When you look for something on the internet, where do you turn?
My guess is either Google, Yahoo or Bing. Using these search engines turns your questions into quality search results. Any search engine's products are strictly the quality of their answers to your queries. If you are a business or you are looking to gain an audience to pitch your views, you need to rank well with these engines. Ranking well usually means you occupy a spot on the top two pages of someone's search query.
Google's search results are found due to a highly complex and long algorithm. Just like famous recipes for food companies, only 2-3 people actually know the algorithm. This is to minimize the risk of anyone finding this magic code out, doing so would ruin the company and make someone a lot of money!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been formulated by companies and individuals through trial and error. Finding out what works and what does not is an ongoing task. There are two general terms to describe SEO Strategies – 'black-hat', and 'white-hat'. Black-hat techniques involve filling webpages with invisible keywords and link spamming from other websites, this was once a legitimate way to optimize your website, but algorithmic teams soon cracked down on these methods, doing this now hurts your website massively. White-hat techniques are not frowned upon, they are used by serious online entrepreneurs. Google, Bing and Yahoo sees these techniques as purely legitimate. If you plan to use these, plan and prepare to see a significant rise in you website traffic.
CONTENT MARKETING
When creating or modifying a website, the most important thing you can do is create high quality and high value content. This content should be very relevant to your cause, overall business and site concept. The search engines like content to be lengthy and either new or updated content to appear regularly.
KEYWORD FOCUSING
So you know what your website is based around, you have written some content to start ranking. Before you go any further, you need to make all of your present and future content is keyword focused. You may want to talk all about your product, but if you do not mention it enough, the search engines will not know what you are trying to promote. But be careful, if you talk about your keywords too much, the search engines will think your spamming them to gain an advantage and you will be marked down severely. The lower the competition you experience of others writing about your keywords, the more likely it is you will rank very well. There are a number of tools available to you in order to make sure you get this mixture of right and wrong correct and you begin to rank, either as a free tool (Google Tools) or or subscription services.
CREATING HIGH VALUE LINKS TO YOUR SITE
This is the first of the many 'off-page' techniques that you can start to build into your SEO strategies. You link in order to gain reputation for your site. A better reputation will allow you to rank higher. Now it is important to make sure that the sites that you link with have a high ranking themselves, the three factors you should consider are Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and there traffic statistics. The best way to get great links is to post comments on high ranking blogs and create unique content articles on high ranking websites with your own URLs associated with them.
This strategy is where you need to be at your most careful.
DO NOT:
Get involved with 'Link Farms'. These sites exist to provide thousands of links with not a huge amount of effort. Google and the other search engines caught onto this strategy early on and the alterations to their algorithms has meant your site may never recover from such an action.
A high amount of link sharing. Search engines do not favor 'like-for-like' link sharing, it is easily found and can harm your ranking. Unique article marketing is a much better strategy and has a greater weighting for each activity you do.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Having some form of social media integration in your site is a great way to create a traffic stream and improve your search engine rankings. Try to incorporate a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+ feature on your website. If anyone decides to share your site into their social media space and you receive visitors from it, the search engines will love you!
I hope that my top SEO tips were helpful to you. By acting upon them you will really start to see the organic traffic to your site grow. Organic traffic is the holy grail for websites because the individuals that find you are infinitely more qualified, this can mean more product sales, sign ups or simply more contacts to add to your mailing list.
Act on these techniques and you will start to see more natural traffic coming to your site from the search engines. Traffic you do not have to pay for is the ultimate goal for any business looking to gain more sales or recognition. With online traffic you leverage your time, while making more sales, contacts and success.
If you have found these SEO strategies helpful and would like to find other great pieces of advice, please feel free to visit my site:
Network Marketing Training