A good search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is what helps your site get found. If you aren’t actively focusing on your SEO on a regular basis, you’re going to have a hard time ranking in Google searches.
What Do I Need to Know About SEO?
The absolute most important thing you need to know about SEO is that it’s constantly changing. What works one month isn’t going to work the next because of how Google updates its algorithm. Staying on top of trends requires time and resources. However, there are a few things that have stayed the same over the years.
What Can I Do to Improve My SEO?
Implementing good SEO won’t push your site up the rankings overnight, but you should start to see results fairly quickly. These 5 tips will help you get started with an SEO strategy.
- Regularly publish good quality content. Keywords are important, but they’re not enough. You need to make sure that your content is reader friendly and interesting. Google looks for cues that your article is relevant. Make sure you’re updating your content regularly.
- Use structured data. This is also known as metadata and will help search engines to more easily read your website. You can download certain tools and plugins that make creating this type of data easy.
- Upload a sitemap. A sitemap is a page that lists links to all other pages. Similar to structured data, a sitemap helps search engines to read your site easier since the information is all in one place.
- Use alt tags for images and videos. Ideally, every page of your website should include a relevant photo. Any photo that you use also needs alt text (alternative text). Google will read the image tag and then check the text for keywords. The same goes for video, which Google also looks upon favorably.
- Remove any duplicate content. All of the content on your site should be original. This means that you should never copy anything from another website, and you should never have two pages on your site with exactly the same content. Google will penalize you for it.
Creating an SEO Strategy
Now that you have some of the basics, it’s a good idea to also set out a strategy for keeping up with the ever-changing SEO landscape. Stay updated on the latest trends and tips by subscribing to newsletters and doing regular keyword research. If you don’t have time to handle all of that while running your business, you may want to consider outsourcing to a company specializing in SEO and internet marketing!