Four Tips for Improving Your SEO
Search Engine Optimization—three words that can make or break your website. If you haven’t been paying attention on how to up your SEO by now, it’s time to start listening.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of your website in search engines. Go ahead and look your business up on Google. Does it appear at the top? On the first page? Second page? Anywhere? The earlier your website is listed (or higher ranked as they call it) the higher the chances are that someone will click on it to find what they are looking for.
There are some basic ways for you to increase your search engine ranking organically, to give your site better results when people search for it. No one really knows the “best” way or “right” way to increase your visibility in search engines, but there are some SEO strategies you can implement that can help.
I found three hot tips from this article that I thought made a lot of sense. These strategies are free, so why not give them a shot? Sure, they take a little time to implement, but if they bring more traffic (and more sales) to your site, what do you have to lose?
WordPress Rules
Any small business search engine optimization specialist will tell you that WordPress is the top platform for setting up your website. —isedb.com
WordPress is a free, open source content management system and blogging tool. Their programming is ever changing and up-to-date, which makes them a favorite for search engine web crawlers. If you are starting a new site or blog—do it in WordPress.
If you already have a site that uses another content management system, think about changing to WordPress. Joomla, another free and open source content management system, is also a good choice. But if you want to create a blog, WordPress is your best bet. I personally use both Joomla and WordPress.
Buy a URL With Your Target Keyword in it
If you are a pest control company in Georgia, doesn’t georgiapestcontrol.com seem like a great place to start? —isedb.com
Your URL is not the place to be creative—unless you have a great big marketing budget to help you promote it. My guess is that many freelancers have a limited budget, and need to get the best bang for their buck. See if your name is available to buy as a URL. Already have an established site with a catchy URL? Re-direct the traffic from your keyword friendly URL to your established site. People do it all the time! Plus, buying a URL is relatively cheap and there are many, many sites where you can buy them from.
Blog Constantly
Filling up your website with lots of great content ensures that Google will come back to your site again and again. This will help you get each page of your site indexed – that is – stored in Google’s cache, so that it can be found online. —isedb.com
Blogging is a freelancers best friend. Search engines, like Google, love content. And the more new content you produce, the better. Each time you write something new on your blog the search engine web crawlers find it every day. The more new content you produce, the more changes the web crawlers find—which translates into a higher ranking on search engines.
Learn to Use Google Keywords
This tip wasn’t in the article I read, but I think it is very, very important. When you are creating all this great content for your blog, you need to pay attention to the words you are using. Create a list of keywords that pertain to your brand and business, and look them up in the keyword tool on Google Adwords.
For example, pretend I owned a store in Oregon that sold home brewing supplies. I just did a search using the words Oregon Beer Making using the keyword tool. You want to find keywords that have a low to medium competition with a high number under the global and local monthly searches. Basically you want to find popular keywords that not a lot of other sites are using. They keywords I would use in my blogs would be: beer making, making beer, and homebrew supplies.
Doing a bit of research on the words you should be using on your site and in your blog posts can make a difference. And keep a list of those great keywords you find on Google Adwords and use them over and over again.
A little bit of research can make a difference in your search engine ranking—and all it costs is your time. It is an investment that is worth making for yourself.
Photo credit: Some rights reserved by stuartdune.
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Great selection of tips.
I think something like Deep Linking might have been a better choice for number 2, since most people already have their URL by the time they’d read an article like this. Number 2 is still a good tip, I just think there may be information out there that’s going to apply to a greater number of readers.
All the same, good article.
Couldn’t agree with you more — and with Google’s recent “freshness” update, blogging constantly is more important than ever.
I’ve read in many places that it’s not just the amount of blog posts but blogging consistently.
It’s far better to post three great blog post a week or even once a week than blogging everyday. SEO will drive traffic to your site but the quality of content will bring your visitors back.
I would also recommend using Google Analytics and Webmasters to help build your keywords.
I don’t do blogging and my site is in flash and I still rank 1st on google for my town of close to 1M people. The above helps but ranking is based on many factors, some of which are not even discovered or documented.
Just a quick note.
Your website doesn’t work on iPhone or iPad. While these devices may seem like a small portion of your potential market, losing one job because your website wasn’t accessible also reduces any chance of referrals to you.
Hop over to Domain Tools to look at your website: http://www.domaintools.com/seo-browser/
Cheers
Paul
Blogging is a good choice, as is obtaining a keyword rich domain.
I’ll add commenting on relevant blogs is a good strategy not only for SEO, but for getting actual visitor click-through, which is what we are all after.
It kills two birds with one stone.
Regarding blogging, is it necessary that the blog posts (or most recent posts) appear on the index page?
I’m designing a new site in WP and I’m trying to figure out exactly where all of this content is going to appear. Something tells me having 50 posts on the front page might be a red flag.
Any links to related articles sure would be helpful.
Good start. However, I think the days of “create a site with good content and Google will come” are well behind us. A couple of years ago we found that a well optimised page on our website was all that we needed, now we see that the competition is much greater.
To compete in the SEO world these days you need to be very good at:
(a) Creating lots of relevant links back to your site/pages.
(b) Creating lots of social signals (Twitter retweets, Facebook Likes, etc) around your website.
(c) Optimising for users that are coming via their iPhones and iPads.
etc.
All good points…thanks for sharing!
I’ve only recently learned about Google keywords. Unfortunately, anything Google wants, we have to make sure Google gets.
SEO is an extremely complex science.
Google was 12 months old when I started learning about SEO in 1998. My interest in SEO came about because I’m in Australia and enquiries from my first website were coming from the US. I thought I was the bee’s knees. Except my business involved physically driving to people’s homes. No chance of me driving to Arizona from Sydney!
My first 20 SEO recommendations are:
1. Download the free ‘SEO Doctor’ plugin for FireFox and use FireFox for testing
2. Use Domain Tools to check your site – http://www.domaintools.com/seo-browser/
3. In WordPress install the Semper Fi All In One SEO Pack Plugin
4. Aim for 60 to 70 characters at most in page titles
5. Aim for 25 keywords
6. Aim for 160 characters in page descriptions
7. Upload an XML site map – there are good free online sitemap generators
8. Use a Robots.txt file to guide search engine robots
9. Check your site in at least IE, Safari, Opera, Chrome and FireFox
10. If you want your site to work on iPad don’t use Flash
11. Also for iPad, keep page widths to 960 pixels
12. Create your Google Aanalytics account first
13. Create your Google Webmaster Tools account second
14. If you have a business phone number put it on all pages at the top
15. Add your phone number in your description – it will show in Google results
16. Check grammar and spelling – Google is a literacy genius
17. Watch your ‘page speed’. Do a Google search for this term to learn more
18. Avoid using duplicate content from other blogs or your own site
19. Never assume your audience knows what you are writing about, be explicit
20. Create a Google ‘Places Page’ you don’t need to display your address just the area you cover.
Bonus tip 21: Use Google ‘Insights For Search’ to see what keywords words are trending in your industry.
This covers about one fifth of how to create a search engine friendly website, but it’s a good start and I hope it helps! By the way, I am not affiliated with any of the sites I have listed here, I just use them and love them!
Cheers,
Paul
Regarding the domain name tip (btw, one buys domains, not URLs) I think the reverse—having the keyword relevant domain as the final destination—may be preferable.
“Re-direct the traffic from your keyword friendly URL to your established site.”
A new domain with no content won’t have any links or much search engine clout. Redirecting from it will only capture visits where people have typed it directly. And once the redirection has happened the end URL is what the search engines will use for keywords associations to the content.
Doing the reverse, e.g. redirecting your clever domain to georgiapestcontrol.com will help associate those terms with your site and content.
This is simpler for new sites and domains. The benefit of redirecting a well-aged domain to a new one is debatable.
Thanks for a really well written ariticle, I specialise in SEO but always refresh myself on the latest articles as we all know things change/update regularly.
Thanks again!
Cherie
These are some of the real important points of seo, really enjoyed reading thanks for the info
These four tips are the essential tips to get your website on the search engines.
@Paul Thomas, You are awesome! You don’t need to upload your sitemap manual, but you can also install the XML sitemaps plugin on the website!