SEO or search engine optimization is one of the main aspects that can help you reap rich returns on the investment you put into creating a website. In today’s world, if you have a website and don’t optimize it, you might as well not have a website at all because your online presence fails to perform in your favor. SEO is different from marketing because in SEO, you primarily target search engines rather than human visitors. So, how do you get SEO started? Here are some simple tips.
Learn about the current trends
Before you get started, you need to know about the latest trends. Every search engine makes hundreds of updates in its search algorithm in order to fine tune the ranking system. Google, for instance, is known to make over five hundred updates on an average annually. With every update, the factors affecting ranking and critical metrics vary. So, it is important that you learn the latest requirements before getting started.
Keywords
The first step of SEO is to decide the right keywords to use on the site. There are a number of keyword research tools that you can use. By performing intensive keyword research, you can zero in on the keywords that are maximum users use to search for services of your niche. Here, you need to keep two concepts in mind – high competition keywords and low competition keywords. Using low competition keywords help you better because it is easier to rank higher among these keywords. As your rank increases, your website begins to rank high among websites that use high competition keywords.
There are several other concepts such as short tail and long tail keywords, conceptual keywords and negative keywords that you need to learn about. An understanding of all these aspects helps you design a strong SEO campaign.
Content
If you want a successful SEO campaign, you have to pay a lot of attention to content. Search engines give higher rank to sites with high quality content. After the latest Google Penguin and Panda updates, the importance of strong content has grown multifold. In addition, when readers read good content, they share it through the social media icons present on the page. So, your readers become your advertisers. Post Penguin update, sharing has become an extremely important factor for good ranking. Robust content with optimal use of keywords, use of infographics and relevant images can get you best results.
Link building
Search engines analyze the links present on your page for ranking. More the number of inbound links, higher is your rank. However, quality of links is more important than their quantity. Never mind if you have fewer links. Find high quality ones and search engines will rank you higher. Link building is one activity that has to be undertaken from the beginning of the campaign and links have to be continuously added in order to retain rank.
On page SEO is crucial. You need to avoid Flash and stick to HTML. The navigation has to be user friendly and make sure that you provide a site map. These and many more aspects need to be kept in mind when you get started on SEO.
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