The 3 letters ‘SEO’ has become more and more commonly used across businesses in all types of industries. Even industries that have historically been less digitally reliant than others have been making big strides in digital marketing and specifically SEO.
Optimizing your website can tremendously benefit your business. It helps you increase your google ranking, allowing you to reach out to more customers. For instance, if you look for small business SEO services, you will find many reputable companies that offer excellent services at a great price.–
What is SEO?
Just in case you are completely new to the term, or have never checked what it stands for – SEO stands for search engine optimisation and it has become a key marketing strategy for many successful businesses of all sizes.
It relates to making websites and online content optimised for search engines such as Google, so that they appear higher up in search results. If your website is higher up in search results than your competitors then you are going to generate more organic traffic (non-paid website traffic). When you get more traffic to your website, your conversion to sales should improve, so understanding the basic principles of SEO will be highly beneficial to you and your business. Visit this website for more information on SEO services.
Main Principles of SEO
Keywords –
According to Titanium Marketing there are specific words and phrases that people will use when they are searching for services or products that you provide. For example, if you are a shoe shop one of the most popular keywords used could be ‘black shoes’, so you need to make sure that your content includes those words.
Some businesses just guess their keywords but this may not get the best results. Doing keyword research will help you to get a list of the best keywords to use in your website content/blogs. You can use free keyword planner tools to allow you to identify the best keywords for your business.
High Quality Content –
The most important priority for Google when it crawls the Internet looking for websites is how useful and relevant it is for what the searcher is looking for. Google ranks sites with a highly complex algorithm that pulls in a long list of factors to help rate each website to get the best results for the user.
Part of the rating includes high quality content, so the better and more informative the content on your website is, the higher you will rank. So even if writing isn’t your thing, getting someone to create great content that demonstrates your expertise in the industry is a good way of getting Google to rate your website highly.
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions –
The meta description (a snippet to summarise your page content) is an important part of optimising your content. The meta description is the short bit of text that shows underneath the website link in the search results page and is essentially the bit where you need to sell your business with carefully chosen, compelling wording that persuades people to click on your website rather than your competitor’s website.
Page speed –
If your pages take a long time to load up then this will annoy your visitors, as many will not wait more than a few seconds. Your pages can be slowed down by a number of things including the hosting company and the size of the content that is uploaded onto the page. So if you are not sure why your web pages are loading slowly, you can use a speed test tool by simply copying your website URL into the tool and it will show you what you need to do to get your page to speed up. There might be one huge file that you need to compress to help it load faster, for example
