If your website is not optimized for the search engines, it is not going to receive a lot of traffic because it will be buried deep in the search engines. And if your site doesn’t receive traffic, then obviously you can’t make sales and grow your business.
Fortunately, you don’t need to become an expert in search engine optimization. And you don’t necessarily need to pay an SEO consultant thousands of dollars to optimize your website.
Here are three basic but highly effective SEO tips to get you started.
Optimize Your Page Titles
One of the absolute easiest things you need to do is add meta titles to your pages. This reinforces to the search engines what your site is about.
You will first need to make a list of keywords that are relevant to your site. You can use Google’s free keyword tool, and you can also get ideas from the page titles of some of your competitors.
Your best bet is to target long tail keywords. These are relevant phrases that contain between two and five words, and they are generally less competitive. For example, “best weight loss supplements” is much less competitive than “weight loss.”
Attract Links With High Quality Content
You need lots of links if you want search engines to rank your site high enough for users to easily find it. The absolute best way get links to your site on an ongoing basis is to create great content. In fact, if your content is good enough, you will never have to worry about having enough quality links to your site.
Another way to get links is to pay a company to get them for you. The problem is you run the risk of having an unnatural link profile. Many SEO companies are not careful enough in choosing the websites that link to their clients’ sites.
If Google thinks you have an unnatural link profile, your rankings will suffer tremendously.
People will only link to great content, so you need to focus on creating quality content for your readers. If you do, you will be rewarded with more and more links and traffic.
Write for Other Websites
Writing guest posts for blogs in your niche has become an important way to get links. Blog owners will give a link to your site in exchange for a quality piece of content.
To make guest posting work, you need to find popular blogs in your niche and contact the owners with guest post proposals. The blog owner wins because he gets fresh content, and you win because you get a link and potentially, traffic to your site from the blog.
Owners of popular blogs are not going to accept an inferior piece of content, so you need to make sure to create a quality post to have it approved.
Conclusion
Of course there is a lot more to SEO than what is covered in this article, but the three tips here are basic yet powerful and effective when done right. Follow through with all three tips, and you will definitely see a steady rise in traffic.
Jennifer Watts is a retired advertising executive. She likes to spend her time outdoors, but when the weather won’t allow that, she likes to blog about SEO and marketing. If you are looking for a web host, go to webhostingreviews.ca for reviews.