Have you spent hours upon hours and maybe even dollars upon dollars building a website that you’re proud to call your own, but just can’t seem to get the traffic that you expected to flood through the gates as soon as the site went live? If you’re stuck with a gorgeous website and zero traffic to see your handy-work, it’s time to work on your SEO.
What on earth is SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of setting up your website in a way that is easy for the search engines and their web crawlers to understand. When done properly, it will help your website move up the search engine results pages (SERPs) and ultimately, drive more traffic to your site.
Okay, sounds good. Now how do I get started with SEO?
It’s time to start thinking about what search queries you want your website to show up for. You’ll likely want to begin with your company name and then move on to the products and/or services that your website offers. From there, add your business location and the general areas that you serve.
This list will help you stay focused while you work on defining your keywords. There are a number of free tools you can find online will help you with this. Check out my resources page if you need a little help getting started. Once you’ve defined your primary keywords, it’s time to plug them into your website.
How exactly do I use the keywords within my website to improve my SEO?
Think of all the content that you’ve written while pulling your site together. The home page, about section, list of services or products, prices, contact information. You’ll want to be sure that each of these pages includes a unique keyword focus that is plugged into the page title, meta title, page description, meta description, body (actual content contained within the page), image file names, and ALT text.
You should know that content is the absolute king when it comes to getting your website to rank on the first few pages of Google (or the other main search engines including Bing, Yahoo, etc.) With that in mind, be sure to include a minimum of 300 words on each page (or blog post) that you publish to your website and keep the keyword ratio at 2-3%.
#TimeHack: If you love free tools that make your life easier, install the Yoast Plugin for WordPress. It automatically tracks all of the factors involved in optimizing an individual page and displays a green light when you’ve covered all of your SEO bases.
Do you have a question about how to get started with SEO for your website? Ask Blue!
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