Search Engine Optimization
The first step to take when you start digital or internet marketing is to host a website and other platforms like a mobile app where you can promote your products from. For your business or company, a website is better.
After you engage the seven major categories including search engine optimization. This is an extra effort put in to ensure that your web pages are visible in various search engines like Google, Bing, and yahoo.
Some clients especially those who have less knowledge about digital marketing are not advised by the website designers. They end up making this common mistake, “you design a website and forget about optimization”.
If your target is to receive online traffic, Search engine optimization is a crucial point to consider. Make sure to hire an expert for this work. It starts with writing fresh content. Search engines like Google, value more freshly written content than duplicate content.
For a person who practices copy and paste, don’t expect to rank higher in Google than a website with pure and unplagiarized writings. There are three categories of SEO and these are on a page, off the page, and technical SEO.
On-Page SEO
This starts with your content. Once you write an article of 500 words or more and post it on your website. Know that Google will first crawl and index it. After the ranking factor comes in once your content is considered valuable to users.
Know that there is competition because Google has thousands of web pages created by various content creators. What matters is quality not quantity and make sure to write for the user, not the search engine.
Once you don’t consider the user first, just know that your page will have a higher bouncing rate. This bigger rate affects the page in the rankings.
Take this from me, a page with no or small bouncing rate is considered by Google to be holding content that is of more importance to the visitors. That’s why you can find your page ranking higher than others.
Moreover, make sure to focus on the keywords to include in your writings. This enables the crawler to detect the real subject you intend to present to your audience.
Some writers have a habit of repeating keywords many times. This is called Keyword stuffing. Avoid it because Google takes it as bad practice (spamming).
Besides content, the other things to fix here are the page titles, Meta description, Meta tags, and images. Give your page a title that focuses on your target keyword.
Your description should include your keyword at the start of the paragraph where necessary. Name your images and also give them the alternative text. Don’t forget about internal linking.
Off-page Optimization
This takes place off your page or site. This is focused more on link building. Link building is the practice of getting other notable sites to link back to your website.
Most optimizers do it through publishing great sponsored and guest posts with backlinks on other websites.
It requires some costs but is rewarding. If you hope to get most of your customers online like tour operators and car rental agencies, there is no way you can avoid it.
With this, you can also present your brand to the public through social media shares, email campaigns, ads, and billboard adverts.
Technical SEO
This majorly includes the actions performed to help search engines crawl and index your website.
It starts with submitting your pages or site map to the webmaster tools, working on the site loading speed, mobile-friendliness, site structure, and checking for broken links.