If you’re an average person, chances are you’ve never even heard of search engine optimization (SEO). After all, it’s really not important at all to a person’s daily life. It’s not going to feed you, clothe you, or help you survive — but it will help to keep you, and the rest of the world, informed. It’ll give you proper direction when you need it most. No, it’s not a holy book or some life-changing guide, it’s just what keeps search engines (like Google) relevant and accurate when searching for information.
What is SEO?
SEO is the best, free way to keep your website high in search engines when people search for things related to your website. For instance, if your website is about cars then you would be optimized for searches of “cars” but not for searches of “banana”. In other words, people that were looking to buy bananas aren’t going to randomly be directed to your website but those looking for cars might.
That doesn’t mean that just because you’ve got a website about cars though you’ll suddenly be at the top of google searches. No, in fact chances are that unless your website is highly specialized, you’ll be around 100+ at best and in the thousands at worst. There are likely dozens of websites already out there related to yours and the fact is that raising your SEO is difficult.
How can I raise my SEO?
I’m glad you asked! It’s actually not hard to raise at all!
For starters, keep your website on topic. Let’s use the car example again. Your best option is to write about cars, have pictures of cars, and just keep everything relevant to cars. This includes car parts, trucks, motorcycles, and maybe even other vehicles like boats, ATVs, etc. As I said previously, specialization is your best bet but keeping a broad array of topics isn’t a bad thing depending on what you want your site and users to be like.
What you don’t want to add is things like dieting tips, NASA missions, technology blogs, or designer clothes options.
Another tip to always keep in mind when trying to raise your SEO is to focus on keywords. The way search engines work is that they’ll send bots to your site to find keywords so they can categorize your site. The more clear the topic of what your site is, the better it’s categorized and the more users will find it through searches.
Keywords include… well important words. For cars, you’d want brands, makes, models, specifications, etc. If you’re a local site, remember to keep your zipcode floating around, the name of the area, city, state, etc.
You also want to keep relative pictures and outbound links. For our car example, it’d be pictures of cars. Surprised? For website links, you’d want to link to other related articles, helpful websites, or even dealer sites.
Raising your SEO won’t happen over night. It probably won’t happen over 60 nights, even. It’s a slow and arduous process and one that will never have immediate results. The thing is though that the longer you stick to it, the higher you’ll go. Hopefully, with these tips, you’ll go quite high, too!