Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic via the search engines. You will often hear me say that SEO for your website is “Set it and forget it”. I’ve have readers tell me that approach is not good, you have to stay on top of SEO for it to be effective.
I totally agree that you have to stay on top of you traffic generating tasks, but there are only about 5 tasks that you need to do with your website to set it up for 100% solid SEO. Meaning, once you set up the website with this these functions, as you add content to your website, all the SEO will be handled by your website. You do not have to do anything.
That is not that same as generating traffic to your website. After you write a blog post, or add content to your website, you need to do many things so that people know you put up new content. Eventually your content will make it into the search engines, but in most cases it will take a while, and I’m pretty sure if you wait for search engine traffic to grow, your business will suffer from lack f visitors.
5 Essential Tasks For SEO success
- Start you SEO strategy when starting the business. You do not want to start a business, build a website, then focus on SEO. When you are creating a business plan, you NEED to define your market or niche.Who are you going to sell to? Who needs your product? the more narrow your niche the easier it will be to define your SEO strategy and mainly define the keywords you are going to use to attract customers…Here is an example of a very broad target market for a real estate professional:
“Home buyers in Oakland California” – That market is very broad and when you try to reach that market with your message it will fall on deaf ears. Here is a better target market. “First time home buyers in Oakland California that want a condo” – There are still plenty of people in that target market and it will be much easier to get your message to the buyers because of less competition. - Define your carrier. How are you going to get your content to your market? You can blog, make videos, podcast, etc… Each of these carriers have ways to get your content to the search engines.Try making videos for Youtube, and embedding them into your blog. Youtube videos have fantastic search engine placement because Google has made a video section in search results. Then, by embedding into your blog, you can double up the content and keywords in your blog post.
- Define your message. How do you describe your products or services? make sure you use popular keywords to describe your products or services. These description are usually on static pages on your website. Since they do not get updated often, you want to make sure they have the proper keyword density.
- Make sure your website code is well formatted. You want the Googlebot to be able to easily understand your content, therefore make sure all the header tags, title tags, and main content is defined in your code.Make sure your webpage title, header tags and meta-data is different for each webpage. If you are using a blog to update your content there are plenty of good plugins like All in One SEO to let you fine tune each page, but in general, wordpress handles most of the SEO.
- Use images effectively. A long blog post with no pictures can not only look daunting to read, but will drive many readers away. Break up the post with pictures. Not only does the post benefit, but you can also use Google’s image search to get more traffic. Google indexes everything, so if you have video, tweets, or podcasts, there is a section for it in Google.I started making sure my images had at least a good description in the alt and title parameters of the image tag. Sometimes, if I edit the picture myself, I try to make the filename include the keywords also. Google images now account for about 15% of my website traffic.
There is not much to it. When starting make sure you define your market. Everything else will fall into place after that. If you don’t know who you are targeting, you will never now how to contact them.
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