If your business is at all involved in social media marketing, you have undoubtedly heard the term search engine optimization (SEO) more times that you can count. But if you ask most business owners you might be surprised how little they know about the actual process of SEO.
Search engines have an extremely complex model for how they rank sites in their search results. To make sure your business gets the highest ranking possible, you need to understand how and why some sites are ranked higher than others. Once you know this, you can work to make sure you are doing all you can to be at the top of the list when people type in a keyword search.
So where to start? Here are the basics when it comes to making sure your site gets the attention it deserves (and you get the sales leads you need):
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· Choose your words carefully. Keywords are what people enter when they are searching for something online. Once you decide what words are the most relevant to your site, you need to insert these words into the content on your site. It is important that these words fit naturally into your copy.
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· What’s in a name? A lot. If your website doesn’t contain your site’s name, it is going to be very difficult for people to find you.
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· A picture is worth a thousand words. Websites that contain images and videos receive higher rankings.
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· Content is king. Content is everything that is on your website. Your content must be updated on a regular basis. This confirms that your website is active and relevant. Adding new articles, blogs, and images or graphics is a great way to do this.
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· Encourage people to share. Make your content so compelling that people want to share it and then make sure it is easy for them to do just that. At the press of a button, people should be able to spread your content across a wide variety of social media like Facebook and Twitter.
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· Link it all together. Internal links allow visitors to better navigate your site and external links offer visitors links to other websites that will offer additional information. Both types of links will increase your site’s SEO ranking.
In the end, content that connects, educates, and inspires will do the most to increase traffic to your site, thereby increasing your ranking. That’s because search engines and customers alike are very adept at pinpointing quality content. What’s more, such content will generate links on your site from other experts which will keep your SEO ranking on the rise.