Search Engine Optimization 101

23 Sep Search Engine Optimization 101

Launching your website and/or blog is an exciting time; you’ve put a lot of thought into your site and now you are about to release it out to the world! What’s not exciting though is spending a lot of time, energy, and money on something that doesn’t go anywhere. The real excitement lies within having people from all over the world reading and responding to your site and content, but people need to be able to find it first. This is where SEO comes in.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, when done right is like being listed in the phone book, in the premium listings section. Unfortunately, many internet users never browse past the first page of search results, so you want your website/blog to rank high in the search engine results page (SERP). SEO is what helps you get there, and having a high SERP ranking is what will increase the likelihood of someone visiting your site.

There is a science to modern day SEO, so stay ahead of the curve by checking out these SEO guidelines by https://scottkeeverseo.com/seo-tampa/ that you should follow in order to make your site more accessible to potential users:

1. Make sure your site delivers a good user experience. The look and feel of your website are going to be the first thing a user will notice, so make sure your website’s purpose is known and written clearly. You want your site to be aesthetically pleasing, and easy to navigate so users can find what they are looking for without having to search too hard for it. Having a simple navigation will help greatly with this, and will help keep people on your site. In addition, most of today’s users are viewing sites from mobile or tablet devices, so you want to make sure that your site is optimized so it can be viewed properly from any device.
2. Know your community inside and out; know what they want to read about and what they don’t know. Be on the lookout for unanswered questions, what is new, and find out what the controversies are. Most importantly, listen to what your community is debating and talking about, and be on top of current trends. Doing this research will help you with keywords and with choosing relevant topics to write about. This way you will have a better idea of which ones to go for because you are already familiar with what your target audience is looking for.
3. Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and RankMgr should be your best friends. Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics will give you the story behind how people are getting to your site, which pages people are going to, and if people are staying on your site or not.  In addition, you will be able to see if you have any crawl errors, the number of sites that link to yours, as well as finding out how many pages Google indexed. While using RankMGR, the search engine keyword rank tracking tool, will provide you with accurate monitoring of your page rank for multiple keywords and will keep track of your SEO efforts; it is a fantastic link building company. It will also allow you to see where your competitors rank, so you can focus and plan your SEO efforts with ease and stay on top of the competition.
4. It is important to have a clever page name and a meta-description that are both memorable and concise. Have a good, strong attractive page title that will entice people to click on it. As long as it’s relevant to its content, it is an SEO plus to try to place relevant keywords within your page titles. Nothing is worse than clicking on an article thinking you are about to read one thing, only to find out the article is really written about something else. You don’t want to lose audience members before you even begin.
5. Talking about keywords; this is an ‘oldie but goodie’ tactic that is still important to your SEO strategy. It is important to note that keywords are not as imperative as they were before, but they are still important and will help your site when used correctly. Your keywords, or key phrases, should be relevant to your content subject. It should be in your best practice to try to take the keyword and incorporate it into the post title and within your content as well. However, do not overdo this or try to place keywords where they don’t belong, or don’t make sense. This will be frustrating to your readers, and you probably won’t hold your audience’s attention for too long. Also, using keywords incorrectly is considered a demerit with the search engine algorithms, which will hurt your site’s page ranking, so don’t overdo it.
6. Having a clear and concise title that draws in your audience is needed, but it will not go any further than this if you don’t have good, strong informative content. Try to have content that is new and fresh, but know that it is OK to rehash other trending topics from around the web as long as you make it your own. It is important to not plagiarize anybody else’s work; it is OK to use ideas from others, but you should be writing in your own ‘voice’, this way your articles are original. ‘Content is king’ and good writing will help you draw an audience from a variety of venues. Be sure to post and update your content regularly (both new and existing), as this will help you be recognized as a reputable site.