What is SEO, and Why is it Important?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. At its core, SEO helps make your website more searchable. It drives more organic traffic to your content, generating new leads, potential clients, and ultimately, more sales.
Sounds great, right? It is! But how do you make sure your content is SEO ready?
Here are my top 3 tips:
1) Keywords
Keywords, like hashtags on Instagram, are the key to SEO. Think about it, when you type a question into Google, you choose your words deliberately. It’s the same thing with SEO keywords. Google (or Bing, or any other search engine) doesn’t know how to find you if your words don’t match the search.
But how do you know which words are the right words?
The first thing is to think like your target audience. What are they searching for? The second thing is a keyword search tool. My current favorite is Moz’s Keyword Explorer. You can sign up for a free account, and get 10 free queries per month.
2) Links
Linking back to your other webpages signal to Google that your page is important, that people are talking about it. The more links to your website, the more trustworthy and authoritative it appears. The top Google results are all websites that others trust and value. You are a subject matter expert when it comes to your content, and clients value that. Google should think you’re an expert, too.
That being said, Google can tell when you’re being spammy. Only link to other webpages when it’s natural and appropriate.
3) Website
Finally, take a look at which of your content performs best. Is it a blog post? A resource? Does it have a lot of images? Is it an in-depth article or a list?
Look carefully at your stats, and then double down. If your audience prefers lists, write more content in list form. Does your audience prefer blog posts about recipes? Share more recipes. You created your business for your audience, create content for them, too.
Tag your posts internally before you publish content on your website. Be sure to write your header tags (these tell readers the title of your page), and include concise anchor text to describe your page to search engines. For example, this post’s header tag will say What is SEO, and its anchor text will be something like SEO Basics.
