How do you feel when you read the words Search Engine Optimization? Do you experience a sudden feeling of confusion and dread? Does your brain shut down or go into flight mode?
Take a deep breath and stay with me. It will be all right. Really. The basics of SEO are not difficult and may very well be all you need to know.
You need to leave the geeky stuff to your website designer. Concentrate on using these basic tenants of SEO in your blog posts, social media, and other web-based content.
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- When choosing keywords, consider your anchor text. They should be keywords, not words like “here.”
- Don’t skip the ‘alt’ tags on images. In WordPress, you can put text in the alt tag area that means something to search engines and viewers too.
- Ensure that you are using the right permalinks. You want them to be pretty without strange symbols and to describe what’s on the page. For example:
- Just as you focus on external linking, you should also focus on internal linking. For example, under a blog post adding an “if you liked this you may like this” link below it may keep your readers reading longer. You or your web designer can install a WordPress plug-in that will take care of this automatically!
- Keep your content up-to-date. Add new content but also upgrade old content by ensuring it’s still relevant and all links work. This is a great task to outsource to a virtual assistant.
- When looking for keywords consider long-tail keywords for your blog posts. For example, instead of “blogging” try “increase conversion blogging tips.”
- The best domain name for good SEO is a name that is a .com, is short, and has keywords. It may be tempting to use another of the thousands of extensions such as .biz but this could affect your Google rank as well as confuse potential clients.
- Headlines matter a great deal when it comes to SEO. Create headlines that include keywords and aren’t tricky.
- When you publish an infographic, also include a blog post with it that supplies the same information in words.
- . For a boost in SEO effectiveness, try posting longer posts. Longer posts show authority which Google likes. There are various opinions regarding how long your posts should be. Read more about this here.
I hope these tips take some of the dread out of the words, SEO Marketing. If you have any questions, leave a comment.
