These days, search powers the internet and having a website that is search-engine friendly and capable of ranking high is essential if you’re to be found by potential clients or customers.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing a site to rank higher in the search engine results pages.
In truth, SEO is a highly detailed and involved process, but there are still some small changes you can make to your website and site content that could see you enjoying better results in a relatively short time.
While there are some tricks you can employ that may help you achieve better rankings in the short-term, if you hope to achieve the best results you should really look at outsourcing to a third-party professional digital marketing company.
Achieving high rankings can take a frustratingly long time if you don’t know what you’re doing – and, even if you manage to get good rankings, there’s also absolutely no guarantee of staying high up in the coveted result pages of Google and others. Also, if you don’t know what you’re doing, there’s an equal likelihood that you’ll harm rather than enhance your ranking. If you’re in any doubt, you should think about enlisting the help of a professional firm like Flyrise that will align your business’ website with its top keywords and execute a plan to get you ranking for them.
All that said, there are still various things you can do yourself that should have a positive impact on your rankings – and will also make the job of a digital marketing company considerably easier should you decide to work with one.
Develop a list of keywords and phrases likely to be used by your clients (potential and existing): You know your business and market better than anyone, so you should also have a pretty clear idea of what terms or phrases people might type in to find a firm like yours. Developing a list of possible keywords and phrases will help you populate your pages with words people are likely to use when they search – greatly increasing your chances of Google registering and delivering your content under these terms.
Give prominence to your keywords: You will likely be using some form of Content Management System (CMS) so, when you’re titling your page and adding a header, think about the keywords that relate directly to that content and include them in both. Also, you should split your main page content into headers – again featuring these keywords liberally. Remember not to go over the top and start throwing words in repeatedly where they aren’t required or don’t make sense, which is considered spamming. Google’s spiders are now incredibly sophisticated and aim to ‘read’ a site’s content much as a human would. In fact, its bots are now so smart they can recognize poor grammar and structure – which, in turn, Google uses to prioritize pages in listings.
Keep sentences short and split long paragraphs: As mentioned, Google now attempts to ‘read’ content and is increasingly frowning upon overly long sentences and paragraphs. Reading long reams of text is tiring on the eyes, and Google knows this. So keep your text concise and to the point.