Your guide to improve SEO ranking

Q: Where’s a good place to hide a dead body?

A: On the second page of a Google search.

 

It’s an old joke, but still relevant. Online advertising network Chitika conducted a study and found that “sites listed on the first Google search results page generate 92% of all traffic from an average search. When moving from page one to two, the traffic dropped by 95%, and by 78% and 58% for the subsequent pages.”

You don’t want this to happen to your website. SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is the method used to increase the ranking of your website on search results. Some examples of search engines are Yahoo, Bing, and the one you are probably most familiar with, Google.

So how do you improve your SEO ranking? Here is the beginner’s guide to getting your website and your business noticed.

Keywords

Keywords are the words most likely used by customers when they are searching, except these customers don’t know you exist yet. They won’t search for “Bob’s Building Supplies,” they will search for “Local Building Supplies” or “Tri Cities Tools Store”. Do some keyword research for your business or hire someone to do the research for you. There are online tools to help you with keywords such as Word Stream’s free SEO keyword research tools and Google AdWords Keyword Planner.

Location, location, location

So you’ve figured out some keywords, but where do you put them? If you hired a web developer to build your site, keywords would have been added to titles and meta tags, which are tags that describe a web page’s content. But when it’s time to add content to your site, you want the keywords to be in places where people most look, such as headlines.

Keep on top of your keywords; review them often because your competition will be doing this too. A great way to use your keywords is to update your content on a regular basis. Which leads us to….

Content

Ok, you’ve put a lot of effort into building your site and researching your keywords. Now you want people to visit and maybe stay a while. So give them a reason to visit on a regular basis. One of the most effective ways is to keep your site current, useful and highly ranked is to publish a blog – which also happens to be a great place to use your keywords.

Customers and potential customers are looking for answers to their questions and a blog can be a fantastic resource for those answers. A building supply store may want to have articles about “The DIY Guide to Tiling Your Bathroom Floor” or “How to Install a Light Fixture in Three Easy Steps”. Search engines love keyword rich content that is updated frequently, so give them what they want.

Try these beginners’ tips to get you started. If you are wanting to increase traffic on your website check back in the coming months as we delve deeper into the world of content and SEO.