Your website has the potential to be your #1 salesperson – but only if potential customers find it. You can help them out by using a combination of on-page SEO tactics, a steady stream of quality content, and social media sharing to get your content and site in front of a larger audience.
On-Page SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) tactics are ways that you can help search engines properly analyze your content so they can display relevant links on results pages in response to users’ searches. For example, if you write an article for your blog, you want to give search engines some clear indications about your main topic as well as subtopics and other details you discuss so users who are looking that kind of information can find your web page. You can do this by placing important keywords and phrases in strategic places like your page title, URL, image tags, and heading tags, as well as including them in the main body of text.
Avoid awkward phrases and keyword stuffing.
When you conduct keyword research, you are likely to find that users are searching with awkward phrases that would be difficult or impossible to incorporate into your article in a way that seems natural. For example, a contractor may find that “home remodeling Des Moines” is a phrase that people often search when looking for companies like theirs. While it would be fine to include these words in the URL and image tags, it would be pretty awkward to try to work them into your title, headings, or text body. While search engines like Google hone in on keywords, they are also getting better at looking at other aspects of a web page (including quality of writing) to sort the best answers to users queries from the blather. As a result, the old practice of keyword stuffing can now actually hurt your search engine rank in addition to annoying your readers with bad writing. Instead of trying to wedge these tortured phrases into your text, use phrases that are close but much more natural, such as “home remodeling in Des Moines.” Google is capable of getting the hint.
Quantity + Quality
In addition to being optimized for search engines, it’s important that your website content also be well written. As mentioned above, search engines are getting more sophisticated and better able to sort good writing from bad. Beyond that, however, bad writing can easily turn off your audience. Whether it’s an article so stuffed with jargon that the average reader has a hard time deciphering it, a long, rambling stream-of-consciousness musing, or a page riddled with grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors, bad writing will turn off your audience. Readers have to work harder to understand bad writing. To engage your audience and keep them on your website long enough to learn more about what you have to offer, make your content accessible and interesting.
Producing a steady stream of content is also critical to getting found online. The more pages you have on your website, the more content search engines have to index for potential results. Regular blogging is the best way to add fresh, relevant content to your site on an ongoing basis and provide the most up-to-date answers to questions your potential customers have about your industry. That is what makes you relevant to search engines and to your audience.
Having more pages on your site also gives you more opportunity to enhance each page’s SEO through internal linking. When you write a new blog post, for example, you can include links to previous blog posts or other pages on your website that contain information that’s relevant to the topic at hand. Links help to drive more traffic to those other pages as well as push them further up the list of search engine results.
Social Media
When you create a new piece of content, tell the world! Sharing your website content on social media is an easy and highly effective way of amplifying your content’s reach. Include social media sharing buttons on your blog to make it easy for your readers to share, too. When your audience to shares your content with their friends, they become brand ambassadors, spreading awareness of your business and influencing others to check you out.
Social media is becoming even more important for SEO because of the current trend toward increased searching for content (as opposed to simply searching for individual profiles) on social media platforms. According to Social Media Week, 2016 is likely to see this trend continue, making a strong social media presence indispensible.
Blue Frog Marketing, with offices in Des Moines and Denver, can assist your company with any or all aspects of SEO for your website. If you’d like to learn more about how improving your website’s SEO can benefit your company’s bottom line, check out our free eBook. Just click the link below to download.
