A lot of people ignore the usefulness of SEO to market their business. They want to just rely on word of mouth or advertising or whatever “magic bullet” they have. The truth is there is no magic bullet. Use all the tools you can and reap the benefits is the much better option.
So why do I want to to make your site my search engine friendly;? The truth is that your website has 2 different types of traffic coming to it. Branded and Organic.
How many people do you think are searching for, oh I don’t know, “366 marketing website design” and how many just search “website design rock hill sc“? My guess is more people are just searching website design Rock hill sc. They clearly don’t know how awesome I am. (Why aren’t you telling them?)
“366 Marketing” is the branded keyword and “website design rock hill” is the organic keyword. Now the branded one is easier to rank for (read pop up) when someone enters it into Google or any other search engine. There is not a ton of 366 Marketings vs. the numerous other website design businesses.
So the first goal is to rank for the branded keywords. Usually that doesn’t take up to much time. If your name is unusual enough simply registering for the domain and having a website is enough.
However, although it is easy to rank for, due to the lack of competition for the search term, people have to know your business to is out there to search your business by name.
The key is to appear for both searches. For that you need to improve your SEO on your website. This will help you market your business to a bigger crowd than people who just have brand awareness of your company.
So here are a couple of things to look for when you are setting up new pages for your website.
- Only try to target one keyword with each page. (Need to know what keywords to select? Google adwords is a great resource.)
- Make sure your targeted keyword is in your url of that page
- The page title should include your keyword or phrase.
- Header or h1 of your site carries a lot of weight with the search engines. It should contain your keyword as well
Next you want to have a couple of references to your keyword phrase on your page. The amount varies vs. the amount of copy you have. Maybe two -three times out of a 300 word article.
Speaking of length of your article you probably want to have at least 30 words on a page. Google will knock you for “thin’ content. So make sure there is some meat on your bones, er page.
Your meta description should have your keyword in it although that is not as important as it was before. The best reason to have it in your meta descriptions is so that it is bolded in search results.
A word of caution: You want the search engines to find you and promote you but you are ultimately selling to people not spiders; the little bits of software that “crawl” (look) at your site.
So you need relevant content. Both of your readers benefit from that.
A good example of something that is relevant to the search engines and to your readers is the images on your website. People are more drawn to pages that have images. But the search engines can’t see the images. However, you can give an image a name using the alt tag. And the best thing to name an image is something that contains your keyword. It is a signal to the search engines that your page is indeed about whatever topic you are writing about.
As search engines get smarter they are coming closer and closer to “reading” a page like a human does. Their goal is to rank pages higher that humans like, not just the spiders.
And there is one really good indicator of when people like a page. Next time we will talk about the absolute best way to get SEO “juice” on you site.
Want to learn more about how SEO helps market your business? Contact 366 for a free one hour consultation.