You don’t necessarily have to employ SEO to improve your websites visibility, but if you don’t purposely try and improve the visibility of your website, then you are leaving it all down to luck – and that is no way to try to run a successful business.
Below, I’ve summarised 5 easy steps that you can undertake to improve your websites visibility with the search engines.
1) Give some thought to what type of phrase you would want searchers to find your website with:
These arent necessarily the ones you would use to find your website – think outside of industry terminology, and give some thought to the type of keywords potential customers might use to find a website offering your service or product.
Whilst this sounds simple, its not always the case, as sometimes you can be too close to your offering – think outside the box a little. If you feel inclined to do so, it’s also worth using tools such as Google’s AdWords traffic estimation tool to give you some idea on the historic number of searches these terms have generated.
2) Ensure that every page of your website has unique title and description tags:
These 2 tags essentially tell the search engines what type of content to expect on a given page, and by having the same title tag and description on every page of your website, you are telling the search engines to expect the same content on every page.
Make relevant use of the keywords you identified in stage 1 in appropriate places – i.e. on pages where those terms are used in the content on the page.
The title tag in particular is widely accepted as one of the most weighty on-page factors that can have positive or negative impact on your search engine rankings or website visibility, yet in so many websites I see it is so under-utilised.
The issue of duplicate title and description tags is probably the most common issue that I find with prospective clients, and yet are so easy to change to be unique for every page, that there really is no excuse!
Particularly in a really niche industry, I often find that sorting out the titles (and to a lesser extent the Descriptions) often gets a website ranking very quickly alone, without any link building efforts. However, this is likely to become less effective the more competitive the targeted phrases are, as in these areas, there needs to be something else (i.e. the link building) that can differentiate these hundreds if not thousands of similarly optimised webpages.
3. Think about the words you use in the links to other pages:
Most website users these days know a hyperlink when they see one, so in most cases you don’t need to spell it out to them with a click here link (lots of competition for ranking for that phrase!)
Instead, give some thought to what type of content appears on the page that you are linking to, and use a brief, few “keyword” description of what to expect on that page within the link. This not only helps your users understand better what type of content they will soon be looking at, but it also tells the search engines what type of content to expect on that page too.
4. Write content regularly for your website:
Search engines love text words – these are essentially the food for their spiders, and the more words you give them, the more often they will come back to feed on them from your website (though don’t worry, they don’t take them away when they eat them!)
Maybe look at writing a regular blog on your industry, or write some news stories – give these search engine spiders the food they need to sustain them and make them re-visit the website.
By finding a way to add regular content to your website, you can also increase the amount of phrases that can drive traffic to your website – the more content you have on your website, the more content you have that can rank and drive traffic to your website, ultimately, hopefully leading to more sales or leads.
5) Make sure you write the content yourself – it should be all yours, yours alone and absolutely unique:
Search engines don’t want to see tens, hundreds or thousands of pages all displaying exactly the same information – they want to see credible and unique content wherever they go, and by doing so, you give this content a chance to rank prominently and drive those sales or leads
I know that sometimes it can be difficult to write in new words what is already said elsewhere on the web – but it really is worth the effort to have unique content all across your website – if you really have to have exactly the same wording as somewhere else, just make sure the search engines don’t index it.
And whilst you are at it, ensure that every regional, manufacturer or product page also has unique content – I cant count the number of times I’ve looked at a new or prospective clients website content, only to realise that it is exactly the same on every page with just the region, manufacturer or product changing from page to page.
This doesn’t count as unique content – because its not unique!
If it’s a place, try and write something informative or particularly pertinent to that area.
If it’s a manufacturer, look at some of then history of that manufacturer, its values and say something specific to it, rather than spouting a load of generic nonsense.
And just because a product is the same as on other websites, it doesn’t mean that the on-page content about said product has to also be the same – step out from the crowd and talk about why to buy it from you, give your own take on the products additional uses etc – give potential customers a reason to buy this from you and not the other guy!
Of course, there is a lot more to SEO than just these elements, but by doing these things together or in isolation, you will give your website a lot more visibility than if you do not.
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