SEO, or search engine optimization is one of the most popular Internet marketing strategies out there. Why? Because it works.
SEO is the process of improving your website so that you rank highly for your target keywords. SEO itself is a collection of smaller strategies that work together to drive results. Let’s take a look at a few.
- Content creation: One of the most important parts of an SEO campaign, if not the most important, is content creation. The content itself is what ranks in search pages, and without high-quality page content, you won’t rank at all. The best content targets your industry’s most important keywords so that you can rank highly for that term – however, it won’t be easy if it’s a short, general keyword that is popular in your specific industry.That’s because it’s likely that everyone else in your industry is also trying to target that keyword, which makes it harder for you to win over a top spot. That being said, the keywords that are the easiest to target are long-tail keywords, which are far more detailed, and read as more of a phrase than a single keyword.
For example, if your business sells running shoes, it will be extremely difficult to rank for just “running shoes.” Instead, it’ll be much easier to rank for a keyword like “size 7 black Nike running shoes in D.C.,” because far fewer people target that specific keyword.
- User-friendliness: Another SEO tactic to help your pages rank is the user-friendliness of your site. This means that your website should be responsive on all devices, no matter the screen size, the buttons should be easy to press, and forms should be easy to fill out. This also means that you have great navigation on your website that helps people find exactly what they’re looking for, and you provide multimedia on your pages so that users don’t get bored with long walls of text.
- Internal linking: In order to keep users on your site for longer, ensuring that your pages have links to other pages on your site is crucial. This is called internal linking. This allows users to bounce around your site with the use of hyperlinks, and it also helps Google to find new pages on your site when you link to one from an old page.