If you want to open a business or you want to make your business rank higher on a specific topic online when your prospective customers search, I’d suggest you don’t miss this post about SEO.
There are a variety of ways to drive traffic to your website, like paid ads, social media or other websites that are linked to yours. However, organic search results appear more credible to your searchers. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic will organically grow over time. Optimizing the site will expose you to search engines as a credible source of information so that your page can be properly indexed and shown in the first search results.
In this post, we’ll explain what SEO is and how you can use it to increase traffic to your website. We’ll give you 6 simple steps you can easily take and achieve your goals.
What is SEO?
Let’s clarify it first with the words it’s made of. First of all, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. A search engine is just a tool like Google, Bing or Yandex where you do a specific search like “How to Make a Digital Marketing Plan?” or “What is TikTok?” and get an answer from websites. Optimization means “an act, process, or methodology of making something as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible”. So if we put them together;
SEO means, to process your website fully functional to answer specific search terms of your prospects on search engines.
So, how to use SEO to rank higher?
1. Write an article specifically on the topic you want to be known for
For example, you want your website to rank on the first page of Google for the keyword “online advertising”. You’d write an informative and interesting article about the keyword of “online advertising”
So, if you want to be ranked high on Google for a specific topic, you need to make sure your web page answers in the highest quality to the question and needs to be recognized by Google’s algorithm to determine who brings the highest.
How do you get your website recognized and placed the top of a Google search? Answer to that will also answer your question of “How does SEO work?”
2. Always answer the main question of your reader
People search for “how to drive traffic to my website with online advertising” so no matter whatever you write to fill 1600 words, make sure you answer that question at the end of the day.
3. Make sure you include the keyword in the URL of your page
Make sure to prepare a good URL with the keyword of your article. I am adding here Google’s URL Builder tool to help you out. Pro Tip: Never include numbers like years or step counts in your URL. If you want to update your “Digital Marketing News 2019” content next year to 2020 by editing it, the URL will remain with “2019”. And any changes in URL creates a 301 redirect and hurts your SEO. You wouldn’t want that, would you?
4. Use the keyword in the title of your web page
“A <title> tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> element of the HTML document. You should create a unique title for each page on your site.” Google, 2017
For example: Which online advertising channels should I use for my business?
Did you notice how is the keyword hidden in the title? That’s something that Google’s algorithm’s going to be looking for.
5. Insert the keyword into the first sentence of the description underneath the title
Something like “Planning digital marketing can be overwhelming and confusing when it comes to online advertising. It needs a good knowledge of online marketing tools and creative work. That’s why I’m here to share with you how to choose online advertising channels that work best for your business.” This also helps you to rank higher on Google or other search engines.
6. Be aware of your image alt-text
Now you can go a step further and edit the metadata on your website.
Mata data is just the information that people don’t usually see. For example, when you hover your mouse over an image, the title of that image should also be relevant to the search term. Even though people don’t see this, Google still recognizes it.
Instead of saving a creative work with a name “Unknown” or “work 123aaa”, try optimizing your photos with your long-tail keyword's various descriptive variations. That’ll too help.
Google also looks at how many times your website is linked to from other websites. If other people are sharing an interesting article that you wrote, on their websites, this could improve your rankings on Google as well. Because Google sees you as a source of important information based on other people’s recommendations. This matter is a little more difficult because you have to rely on other people. But as long as you’re writing high-quality information and you’re networking within your industry, then your chances of this happening go way up.
Google also looks for related keywords on your website. So, if you write about “digital advertising” and want to have a greater chance to ranking higher, then you’d also want to include more information on your website about similar keywords within that same niche. So you could write articles about “How to Measure Your Facebook Ads’ ROI” or “Why You Should Listen to Instagram Ads’ Insights for Your Business” or “7 Free Online Tools To Create Stunning Ads Visuals”. Because these are all relative topics that a visitor to your website might be interested in. And Google will reward this by ranking you higher.
There’re also some illegitimate ranking methods that I don’t recommend use it. Because Google’s cracking down on these. These methods like paying for more website traffic from third party sites. Or maybe hiding keywords on your website with invisible text to make it seem like it’s more relevant to the topic than it is.
So my number one recommendation is to create high-quality content that is focused on a specific topic and then you’re using some of the other legitimate SEO techniques that I’ve mentioned earlier to get your business ranked higher on Google.
If you can implement those techniques, then you’re already ahead 90% of the people on the internet.
I’ll also add here an SEO Starter Guide from Google to help you rank higher for online searches.
For the short cutters, here is a complete checklist to help you rank higher using SEO.
There you have it!
Once you rank higher and start getting traffic more than ever, don’t overlook. Now it’s time to take a step further and analyze your audience. Watch what works for mobile devices and what don’t. Observe what search term did your audience use to come across your website. We can talk more on that later. I am leaving here the Google Analytics link to get you started measuring your work.
If you need us to write thrilling content for your web page that would improve your SEO, say Hi!