Embarking into the unknown world of search engine optimization (SEO) can be a bit daunting. Finding answers to your SEO questions can prove to be even more tricky (if that is even possible). The problem is, far too many people know just enough to be dangerous, but not quite enough to properly enhance your sites SEO performance.
To give you a jumping point, here are three things you can start doing today:
Keyword Research
Content is king, in the world of SEO. This reason for this is pretty simple: search engines can’t list what they can’t read. The spiders they use read sites just like you and I, and use the content they read to determine relevance to the user – based on their search phrases. If you aren’t sure about the keywords you’re using, or want to find better keywords, check out Google’s Adwords Keywords Tool. Make sure you’re communicating using words your audience would use – rather than internal language.
Title Tags
Many don’t realize it, but one of the strongest things you can do to improve SEO performance, is to make sure your page titles (the text displayed at the top of your browser window) is in line with the text on that page. Often times, developers get lazy and have the tendency to just label all pages with the company name. For example, rather than “The Morrison Agency” title for our work page, we use “The Morrison Agency Work Samples”. The latter of the two is more descriptive of what is seen on the page.
Back-linking
One of the many ways search engines determine which sites to serve up in search results, is based on relevance – as mentioned previously. One thing you can do to establish perceived relevancy, is to let other people vouch for you. This is accomplished through getting other sites to link to your site. This tells search engines that you are a credible source of information, because not only are you saying what the user is searching for, but others link to the information you’re sharing as well.
Now, this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of SEO initiatives, but it should give you a little extra ammo with which to promote your site.
Matt Mikulla says:
There is nothing worse than visiting a website and every page title says Mozilla Firefox or insert browser name being used. Meaning, the designer completely left out title tags. Having SEO and design teams working together avoids those unnecessary mistakes.
Also, Getting quality backlinks can be extremely hard. Thankfully there are pros out there that know exactly how to acquire those links.