There’s a lot of pressure on entrepreneurs in the world today: you are fighting to get your business and products noticed in a marketplace that is already teeming with players that have been there a lot longer and have much more to dedicate to their online marketing strategies. It can be easy to get discouraged.
The aim of this article is to provide useful tips that can take you from obscurity to visibility. These search engine optimization strategies can be applied by any business in any industry; you need only extrapolate to make them fit your exact trade. In the end, Google and other search engines want only two things from you:
- A clean site that makes communication with search engine crawlers easy.
- High quality content which naturally earns backlinks from authoritative sites.
If you need to carry out an SEO tune-up, here are the key strategies to concentrate on for maximum ROI:
- Keyword research – make sure that your major keywords are kept current. The market is always changing, which means that you have to ensure that you are ranking for keywords which have the highest strategic value and are most likely to attract high quality traffic.
- Update tags and content – ensure that your latest strategic keywords are included in the title tag, Meta descriptions and on-page content. However, don’t stuff them where they don’t fit. If necessary, rewrite sections to make them fit in naturally as needed.
- New content – Google loves sites that offer up high quality content on the regular, so create unique content around your strategic keywords frequently.
- SEO Diagnostics – Google Webmaster Tools is excellent to help with this, and it’s free. Use it to find out where your SEO is falling short and implement suggested changes to ensure that you rank highly. It can also show which strategies are not working so that you can ditch them and redirect the effort to tactics that show high returns.
- Internal linking – the pages within your site that have the most links show Google that those pages are important, therefore it is advisable to display links to the top pages on your site at the footer section of the site, with some keywords included in anchor texts of these links.
- Improve good backlinks – try to ensure that high quality/value backlinks from related and popular sites have a keyword where possible. Don’t use the same keyword or Google will interpret this as link manipulation.
- Disavow low quality links – similarly, any links from unrelated sites, ad sites or bought links should be removed. Where this is not possible, disavow them so that the ratio of your good to bad links is as high as possible.
