It would be wonderful if you could go back in time to the early days of the Internet. You could slap up a blog about anything and just start writing. Your content didn’t have to be very good back then. Since blogging was new, you got tons of massive traffic if you just took the initiative to write a few blog posts. While sales and profits were rather easy to come by back in the day, that isn’t true now.
You absolutely must keep the search engines happy if you are going to get any significant level of free traffic. You also want the right kind of traffic. This means you would prefer 100 people showing up to your site that are really interested in what you are offering rather than 1,000 random people who may or may not care about what you have to say.
Our Smart SEO Rules
You can keep your prospects and the search engines happy at the same time by practicing smart SEO rules.
Sprinkle your text with keywords and related phrases that tell the search engine spiders what your business is about. If you have a gardening blog and you put up a post about your favourite cake recipe, you’re going to confuse your audience … and the search engines.
This means you must stay relevant. Everything on your site or blog needs to involve things that are related to your business and the products or services you’re offering. Put an important keyword in your domain name if possible. Keywords and phrases need to be added to your titles and subtitles, H1 and H2 headers, and in your alt image tags and captions.
Go into the back office of your website and change how your URL is displayed. Make sure it’s reader friendly and has your target keywords in it. While you are in your back office, apply relevant tags and categories to every web page. This quickly tells search engine spiders exactly what topic you are covering on each page.
Make sure your website is mobile friendly. That means you should be using a responsive web theme. Ever since 2017 mobile web access has outnumbered desktop and laptop access. The trend has continued as smartphones and tablets are the preferred means of Internet connectivity. Many more people will be checking out your website from a phone or tablet, so make sure your site is mobile friendly.
Register your website with Bing and Google Webmasters tools. This ensures you’ll get indexed rather than just hoping that it will happen. Link each page of your website to other pages. Make sure you have a few outbound links that point to the biggest blogs and sites in your niche. Develop a social media presence and build backlinks that direct traffic to your web property.
Write guest blog posts for other bloggers in your market in return for a link back to your site. These are just a few basic (and proven) SEO practices that can dramatically boost your traffic flow.
If you would like help taking your business further online, SEO and digital marketing is one of our specialisms. Reach out to us today for advice on how to effective use SEO for your business!