How to Become Your Own Search Engine Optimization Guru
You want that great website. Stylish, sleek and keeps the customers coming back. But to have them coming back, they have got to find your site in the first place. The process of getting visitors to find your site is called search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is really about making sure you have got good content consistently on your site. There are three easy steps to being prepared to optimize your website.
- Identify your Core Market: In a lot of cases this might be an easy step for you. You have one product with a purpose, you know the other players in the market, and you know why people need your product. That is a great start! If you have a broader audience, this will take some work. You need to figure out the different markets you are hitting and how prominent your product is in each market.
- Identify Tactics: Now that you have identified who is using your product, you need to target them. A good way to do this is by producing content, perhaps with a blog similar to this. You need to keep your blog on target though. Before you go out there and just start typing, you need to have a plan of attack. Identify what keywords are important to your product and will lead traffic to your site from search engines. A good place to find this information is in Google and Bing’s webmaster tools.Where your site ranks in a search engine does matter. The quicker a person sees your site, the more likely they are to navigate to it. Targeting these keywords is how you get higher in the search engine rankings. Focusing on a keyword in a post will make your site more visible in search engines.
- Add Value: Steps 1 and 2 are the preliminary steps in the process. Now we take action. You want to curate (or is it Kiar-ate?) your content based on what we have figured out about our audience and the keywords involved with our product. You take the style and attitude of your audience and translate it into your product while targeting the end user. The important part about this step is that it needs to enrich your website. It needs to add value. Stay away from overloading pages with just keywords you want for your website. This doesn’t add any relevant content for your visitors. Give your site visitors enough information to make an informed decision.
Let’s talk about what makes content valuable a little more. Consistency is key. You want your visitors to keep coming back. To do this you need to instill the idea that there is always new information added. Monthly content updates about your product or your company is a great way to add valuable content to your website. At the beginning of the year, you and your team should sit down and construct a calendar of the content you will be producing monthly. In doing this, you want to target keywords that visitors might be searching for to find your product. Creating content around these keywords will add value to your site and make it more visible in search engines.
When I talk about content I am talking about virtually everything consumable on your website. The blog is a good way to keep your customers updated. In addition to blogs, photos and videos are great additions to ANY website. Do not forget to share your content through various social media outlets. Versatility opens up the range of the audience you could be hitting. Visuals also create a level of personalization with the visitors. Having a personal bond with potential customers is going to heavily increase the ability to convert potentials into actual customers.
These are just a few basics to understanding SEO and making sure your site is properly indexed by the search engines, a beginner’s guide if you will. Just make sure to make consistent updates to your website that add value and you are on your way to giving your visitors a great user experience!
