If we want free advertising and attention brought to our product, website, organization etc through the popular search engines; SEO or Search Engine Optimization is vital. Follow our guide for the main factors to successful SEO.
The tricky part is selecting the right keywords that will be searched for, but won’t be lost in the other 100,000 results that the search engine brings up. If you are promoting, say, a wedding company, using the words ‘wedding company’ will bring up so many results it just isn’t worth it. Think about what you would search for.
Is it a wedding company in your home town you are looking for or overseas if you are planning a wedding abroad? Narrowing down the options is a vital part of SEO. There will be a lot less results for ‘wedding company in Newcastle’ which will drive vital traffic to your website.
Analyze your competitors. Where is there position on the search engine? What keywords are they using? Just a change of word or phrasing can make the difference between being on page one or page ten. You may know of competitors in your area but you will be unprepared for just how many there are online. The success of your SEO campaign depends on knowing your competition and beating them at their own game.
I know how exciting it is to have a new website and you can’t wait to go live, but take a step back and do the necessary work first. This will save a lot of frustration in the long run. Write a list of keywords that are appropriate to your site. You may think this is a waste of time but trust me, once you start you could well end up with a list of over a hundred words. Add to this keyword phrases and that’s an awful lot of options to choose from. Take your time trying these out in various combinations, time consuming yes, but definitely worth it.
Once you have a list of the various keywords and phrases that you intend to use for your SEO campaign, run them through the various search engines. Then edit, adjust and switch around until you have words and phrases that A) you would use to search and B) are relevant to your site. The name of your site is also a major factor in SEO. It needs to describe your site but also be searchable. Dave’s plumbing may sound great, but run that through a search engine and it will bring up every listing that has either Dave or plumbing in the title as well as using them as keywords so you end up with millions of results. Would you go through hundreds of pages to find what you’re looking for? I certainly wouldn’t, and neither would the online searcher. They’d see the amount of results generated and click on the one at the top, not a great result for you when you’re languishing on page 723!
SEO is vital to the success of any online business, so take your time, do your research and ensure that before you submit your site for inclusion on the search engines you have picked the best possible keywords and phrases. Once submitted, it is virtually impossible to change the keywords and you will have to start again from scratch, so make your SEO is spot on from the start.
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