It’s not easy to drive traffic to a website. It takes time and money or technical skills. There are dozens of channels to chose from and it’s hard to know where to start. Social media and paid marketing are effective and do drive clicks, but they can be expensive. With search engine optimization (SEO), you can help people find your site on search engines like Google and spend less money on paid ads.
According to Moz, a search optimization leader, “Search engine optimization is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.” SEO is a valuable tool to earn customers rather than pay for them directly.
The first step to improve SEO is to choose a keyword or key phrase for each page. Each of your webpages should be mostly about that key phrase. For example, you may chose your name as the key phrase on your bio page and the page will be all about you. Or you may use “cleaning services” as your key phrase on a page that talks about that service. Keywords keep your contact focused and search engines like that.
To improve SEO and help visitors learn what your page is about, you’ll want to use your keyword or key phrase in the page title. Using our example above, the page title may be as simple as “estate planning” or “Estate Planning in San Francisco.” Be sure to use the keyword in your page title and try to use that word at the beginning of the title. The title tag is the first thing a user sees in search results, but it’s also one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine the topic of a page.
Most content management systems (ex. WordPress or Shopify) allow you to customize the page link. Use your keyword or key phrase in the page link. Staying with our “estate planning” theme, the link may look something like this: companyname.com/estate-planning. It’s short and easy to share, it’s descriptive (the key phrase is in the link) and search engines see another signal that your page may be about estate planning.
Headings guide readers through a page. They should indicate what a paragraph is about so people know what to expect. Make it easy for people and search engines to quickly scan your page and find relevant content by using headings. Think of headings as an introduction to a new topic. Use an H1 heading size for page titles. Use H2 heading size for something like a subheading. The title of this post is an H1 heading and each section is an H2 heading. Search engines use headings to index content by better understanding how it is organized.
Images bring a page to life and can also improve SEO. Everybody loves pictures, even search engines. Though optimizing imagery is a separate and additional lesson, we strongly recommend including an image on every page or post you publish for best results.
Put these tips to good use and let us know how it goes.
