You may have a great business idea or a fantastic product, but it can be hard to gain traction when you have poor online visibility. If your target audience or investors cannot find you on Google or other search engines, you might miss out on sales opportunities or leads. Fortunately, there are some steps you can take to improve your website’s search engine visibility and boost your business. Here are a few search engine optimization (SEO) tips to get you started.
Focus on quality over quantity
If you want to increase your search engine rankings, it is not enough to cut and paste a lot of content on your page. High-quality content is much more likely to appeal to users and draw in new business. It will also increase the chances of your content being picked up by search engine crawler bots.
Content research – If you want to attract a particular audience, you must first know what that audience is interested in. You can conduct this research on sites like Quora or Reddit to find questions people are asking related to your field. You can then create content that answers these questions. Make sure that your content is informative and valuable to your readers, rather than just full of sales pitches. This will encourage your readers to share your page and increase its visibility.
Keyword research – Create quality posts by including relevant keywords that your target audience is likely to search for. You can research popular keywords by using basic free tools or more robust paid tools designed for enterprise users. Once you have your keywords, try to include them naturally in your blog posts and articles. Avoid stuffing your posts full of keywords just because you want to rank for that term; it will make your content look spammy and can harm your search ranking instead.
Build inbound links
Search engines use links to judge the popularity and quality of a site. Domain authority (DA) is a metric that can be used to determine how valuable a site is to a search engine. If you want to improve your search ranking, you should focus on earning quality backlinks to your site from reputable and high DA sites.
Earn backlinks – You can earn backlinks by creating guest posts for other sites in your industry. These sites will often be happy for you to add a link to your site in exchange for an article that is informative for their readers. Some high DA sites such as Forbes may be very difficult to secure a guest post on. In such cases, it may help to enlist a search engine visibility expert to leverage their relationships. You can also reach out to sites that link to your competitors and try to get your site listed as well.
Social media – Your social media profiles are also a powerful way to drive traffic to your site. Use your profiles to share useful content and interact with others in your industry and encourage them to learn more by visiting your website. Social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn are particularly good for reaching targeted audiences. While some social media sites use no-follow links which do not count towards domain authority, the increased traffic still works to build awareness about your brand.
Do the technical stuff
In addition to making sure your content is good, you have to structure it in the right way for search engines to understand. This will help improve your search ranking. Some SEO best practices are easy for laypeople to implement while others can be a bit trickier. Below are two that you can perform by yourself.
Meta tags – Meta tags contain important information to help search engines understand what your content is about and index it properly. The most used meta tags include the title tag, meta description, and meta keywords. These are usually included within the section of your page and can be edited by adding them to the source code of your site. If you use a content publishing system such as WordPress, you can also get plugins that will help you add meta tags to your posts.
Page structure – Page structure helps crawler bots interpret your content correctly. You should have a clear post title that is relevant to the topic, and break your content down under subheadings. Make sure that you use the proper heading tags (H1, H2, H3) for each section. Your content should also be at least 500 words long and contain some useful links. It is always more engaging to add images to your web pages. However, note that key images should come with alt tags to help bots understand what they are for.
So, there you have it—six actionable ways that you can start to improve search engine visibility and drive more traffic to your website. Many aspects of search engine optimization can be undertaken by everyday business owners just like you and me. That said, if you want to gain access to professional article writers or experienced technical SEO experts, it is best to hire the services of a company that specializes in that area. With a little effort, your website could be moving up the ranks of the search engine result pages in no time!
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