Considering how easy it is to make a website or a blog today, it is
not surprising that a lot of people are interested in what is it that they need
to do in order to increase the online exposure of their website.
For those of you interested in
the basics of SEO, who still consider themselves beginners in the discipline,
but would like to get a general overview of how SEO works, we have compiled a
short list of important parts of every SEO strategy.
Keyword Identification
Even though the latest Google’s
algorithm update will devalue keywords to some extent and shift the focus to
search entities, keywords will always be an important part of how people
search. The first thing that you need to do is find a set of keywords and
phrases which are likely to bring you the kind of audience that you want, and
then make different variations of those words.
Once you have a list, analyze
them in one of keyword tools, like Google AdWords, or similar, find which ones
are most sought after, and which ones you stand a chance of ranking for. Once
you have identified the keywords that you are going to pursue, you can move on
to the next step in the process.
Competitor Research
Enter the keywords you want to
focus on in Google’s search bar, and take note of the sites with the highest
rankings. Once you have a list of the dominant websites, you can begin
harvesting them for leads and ideas on what you can do to boost your rankings.
Apart from checking out their content, cooperation with other websites, and
similar aspects of the management of their website, you should also take a look
at their backlinks.
There are a number of free tools
out there that will help you get a nice and comprehensive list of links leading
to the website you are analyzing. You can use the list to try and formulate
your own exposure strategy, and get to a number of other authoritative websites
in the niche, which you can also analyze.
Taking Care of Your Onsite
Ideally, this part of
optimization is done while you are creating the site, but you can always make
your existing website more ‘crawler acceptable’. Good onsite will make it
easier for crawlers to find you, and will make the site more user friendly,
which always converts to better rankings. Among other things, onsite includes
providing an XML sitemap, giving appropriate titles to your pages, adding meta
tags where needed and making sure that your internal linking structure is
optimal.
Providing Great Content and Reaching out
The quality of your content is
one of the major factors in how successful your SEO campaign and your website
in general can hope to be. Informative and topical content will make people
want to come back to your website, and recommend it to their friends, which is
why you should never skimp on this part of your site management.
Once you have everything in
place, you can begin promoting your website. There are numerous ways of doing
this, including link building, guest posting – both accepting and writing guest
posts can benefit you, as well as trying to engage your audience on social
networks.
Would love to here from you...