When used in combination with a business-wide marketing strategy, tried-and-tested Google-friendly SEO tools and techniques can undoubtedly help improve business visibility and credibility.
However, while search engines may be fooled by some techniques and tricks, the main purpose of SEO should always be about making your website noticeable to the user and providing them with the information they require. As such, the following tips are designed to help generate sustainable growth and visibility:
Tip one: Build better backlinks
Link building is all about increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a page. However, it’s worth remembering that this is best achieved through natural growth. Sites that add a few links each month are not only recognisable by search engines such as Google, but will also score more highly than those which introduce a sudden influx of backlinks.
It’s also worth noting that the backlink’s position on a page can dramatically decrease or increase its value. For example, a link placed on the footer or sidebar won’t be seen as having value by Google.
In all, quality is more important than quantity: getting a single link in a credible high-value news site, blog or even Wikipedia will be far more effective than multiple paid-for backlinks.
Tip two: Keep a close eye on your competitors
Being aware of competitor activity will help ensure the right direction for your website strategy, avoid simple but costly mistakes and stay one step ahead of your nearest rivals.
In most cases, you can get all the intelligence you need from your competitors’ websites. First, look at which keywords appear and their positioning. It is surprising how often you can increase your use of long tail keywords [specific keywords that are less common individually but combined are more frequently searched for].
Using a search tool can pay dividends when it comes to tracking market trends and adjusting your own marketing policy. This may include, for example, taking all the keywords your top five competitors are using for ads and identifying those used by the top three that you own site has not adopted. If these keywords work for them, why shouldn't they work for you?
Tip three: Make your content stand out
The key rule with content is to make it unique and avoid copying and pasting content from different sources. A simple way to boost your traffic quickly is to create content based on most popular keywords, using Google autosuggest.
Other ways to help make your content work better include ensuring your keywords appear in the first 100 words and, where possible, avoid using duplicate content. However, if, for example, you have an online store and it is impossible to create unique descriptions for every product or service, your web developer should insert a rel=canonical attribute into the page coding to identify the duplicate content. This prevents Google from indexing it and penalising the repetition.
Google divides content as having an easy, medium or high level of difficulty based on its clarity. To maximise success, make sure your copy falls into the ‘easy’ category. In addition, use multimedia - including images and video - along with text and ensure you optimise all your content. If you do add videos it can also be worth generating a video sitemap, as this will encourage search engines to go deeper into the site to find the video content.
Tip four: Use social media
From an SEO point of view, posting content updates and links on Google+ and Twitter has been shown to contribute towards significantly higher Google rankings. Google+ and Twitter will index your page within a few hours, compared with Google Bot which can take a week or more to crawl your website.
As well as using keywords and site links in the post, avoid making it appear too corporate to potential readers by avoiding direct brand references. Other ways to boost business visibility include creating official pages and profiles on LinkedIn and Twitter. The more employees with LinkedIn profiles the better, especially when the company name is featured in the title.
Tip five: Get your brand out there
Mentions and links on news sites can go a long way to improve Google rankings, especially if the story is picked up by Google news. In promoting the brand online, it’s also worth adding your website to Google’s Places for Business. Even if yours is an offline company, this will help your customers pinpoint your location via web searches and in turn attract more attention to the site.
By Alexandra Tachalova, brand manager of SEMrush.
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