How to Start Marketing Your Business Via SEO
If you want to grow your business, you need to market it. That doesn’t mean that you must invest massive amounts of money to create and implement a marketing plan. Marketing a business isn’t as easy as having fun playing few rounds of online poker to pass the evening, but it’s easy enough to do much of the work by yourself.
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DIY SEO
Some aspects of Search Engine Optimization are complicated, and to make sure that they are done effectively, it’s best to acquire the services of a professional. Tasks like aligning content, position tracking, optimizing your page speed, organic research, traffic analysis, and competitor research are done most effectively by a marketer specializing in SEO.
However, there are many tasks that you can do yourself. It takes a bit of time, and there’s a learning curve, but there aren’t many specialty skills needed to align your content with search intent and push your website up in the search engines. If you try to do everything at once, you’ll likely become overwhelmed, but if you take it step by step, you can
Keywords
SEO refers to the organic searches that people do to find information that they need. The further up you are in the search engine rankings, the more easily people will find your site instead of that of a competitor.
Therefore, you want to know what types of search terms people are using to discover the kind of product or service that you are offering. You want to make sure that those search terms are included in your site, both in the content that people see on the site and in the back end – the developer builds and maintains components to power the site and tell the search engine what content the site contains.
To ensure that you are using the right keywords, find a keyword tracker or keyword tool. Google offers one that you can use for free, as do many SEO sites.
Each keyword tracker works differently, but in general, you either type your website URL into the tracker or a few words that summarize your content. The tool will then show you the ranking keywords that you should make appear in your site’s frontend (content) and backend (tech).
Search engines read “long-tailed keywords,” so it’s important to make sure that you include short phrases instead of single words as the keyword.
Headers and Descriptions
Headers are like titles and subtitles that tell the site visitor what to expect on the webpage that s/he is visiting. By making those headers SEO-friendly, you can boost your website in search engines. The main header of a page is an H1, and subheaders are H2s, etc.
Your headers should include your keywords. You should carefully select your headers to reflect the keywords that people may be searching for. Each page should have its own specific header and sub-headers. You can structure each page so that the H1s and H2s outline the content that appears.
The meta descriptions for your website’s pages give more insight into what each page is about. The meta description is what appears on the search engine page that describes, to the visitor, what kind of information they can expect to find on the page. A good meta description can draw people to your website though it’s questionable whether it has any effect on SEO rankings.
Marketing business via SEO: Links
It would help if you created both internal links and external links for your web pages. The internal links demonstrate to search engines that your pages inter-connect. Internal links help the search engines identify the most important pages on the website. Sites that have a lot of interlinked pages are rated by search engines as more authoritative than those with fewer links. The internal links include links from one page on a website to another on the same website.
External links where your site is linked to the keyword anchor text establish your site’s authority in the field you want to be noticed. You can get external links by developing relationships with other sites that feature similar content to yours. There are:
- Organic Links – Your site is linked to other high-quality sites because your site is seen to offer expert information that other sites want to quote or copy. This is one way to establish your authority in your field with the search engines;
- Whitehat – good, quality link building where you can secure links on top quality sites. You can do this by creating content for a third-party site that agrees to publish your content with a link that goes back to your site or, sometimes, paying a third-party site to publish content with your information. You can create these links through blog posts, industry articles, infographics, videos, tutorials, and “How-To Guides” and podcasts;
- Blackhat – low-quality, spammy link building on low-quality sites. Search engines will penalize you if links to your site appear on too many blackhat sites.
How to Start Marketing Business Via SEO: Google Analytics
Stay up to date with your website’s performance by linking your site to Google Analytics. Once you register for Google Analytics, you’ll be given a “header code,” which you must add to every webpage’s backend.
The analytics tool will give you information about which of your web pages are performing well and which ones are not, demographics about where your traffic is coming from (age of the viewer, location of the visitor, etc.), your bounce rate, sites where your link appears and from where people are navigating to your site, etc.
The tool provides a wealth of information that allows you to better tailor your site to the people looking for the information you have to offer.
