SEO Basics for any business

Say you have a beautiful new website, but the phone still isn’t ringing as much as you’d like. This is the lament of many businesses. The truth is, “If you build it, they will come” applies only to magic baseball fields. It takes work to draw search engine bots and spiders to your website, and more work to make them happy.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science of getting your business noticed on the Internet. There is an endless amount of on and off-line techniques to make your website more visible to your prospects, but organic search relevancy is a good starting place. It does take work. Expect to invest substantial time and effort prior to launching your website, and a few hours monthly thereafter. Of course, you can always hire an agency to do the work for you, but if you’re willing to do on your own, you do it correctly and you don’t expect instant results, you can make some gains.

Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization

SEO KEYWORDS AND KEY PHRASES

A good SEO plan begins with a strong understanding of keyword terms and phrases. We call this “fishing where the fish are.” It’s about how your prospects think when searching for products and services like yours. For example, say you sell handmade clothing. There are 50,000 more searches per month for “kids clothes” than for “children’s clothing”. You can turn this knowledge into a competitive advantage by optimizing for the term, kids clothes (no apostrophe).

ON-PAGE SEO

If you’ve spent much time around marketers, you’ve probably heard the saying “content is king”. When it comes to SEO, it’s true. Meaty, relevant and original content is essential for strong relevancy and retention. Thoughtful incorporation of strategic terms into website page names, file names, ALT tags, meta titles, meta descriptions and page content is a time-consuming undertaking. But if you start with a strong understanding of the best keywords and key phrases to use for each page, you can write your content around the terms instead of retrofitting them into your copy.

SEO LINKING STRATEGY

Backlinking and cross-linking are also critical elements of strong search engine optimization. Google cares if you’re endorsed by the popular crowd, which means you should get as many high-ranking websites to link to your website as you can. There are good ways and bad ways to go about doing this. Avoid automated backlinking services that promise a large amount of links in a very short period of time. The quality of the resulting links are suspect, and Google may penalize you. A strong internal cross-linking strategy is beneficial, too.

The aforementioned steps represent SEO basics. There are endless additional tactics to improve website optimization and rankings and multiple articles, tutorials and training resources are available online to help you make search engine optimization an ongoing and productive part of your monthly marketing strategy. Alternatively, a reputable marketing agency like Insyntrix can help.

Insyntrix is a full service marketing agency located in Wellington, FL. We regularly publish helpful tips and tricks designed to help you elevate your marketing efforts.

Questions or want to share some thoughts?