If you have your own business then you will probably rely heavily on a great marketing strategy to promote your business and generate customers. If your business is in a highly competitive industry then you will need to have a very effective marketing strategy to keep up with competitors. As well as building marketing channels like email campaigns, social media accounts and direct mail, it is increasingly important to have a website that is ranked highly by search engines.
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If you’re not overly familiar with search engine optimisation, then it is probably time that you start to learn more about it, as the success of your business could hinge on it. Understanding SEO is complicated by the fact that the metrics used to improve your rankings are frequently changing. So it is not as easy as outlining the top ten things that will improve your ranking and working on those. There are companies that can help you improve your SEO rankings for you, such as full service marketing agency.
An article published by Entrepreneur listed the following four SEO principles and these are generally what marketers will use to improve rankings:
Keywords – Keywords are essentially the words that someone will type into Google or any other search engine to find the product or service that they are looking for. There are keyword planning tools available so you can find out which words are used the most. So, for someone looking for a florist, they may use ‘Florist in Manchester’ as their keywords. Your page content should include the keywords so that your website comes up when someone searches using those keywords.
Image tags – Whenever an image is added to a website, it should be labeled so that the search engine knows what it is. You should also have image tags so that visually impaired or blind people that use special software to read the website have a description of the image. Going back to the florist scenario, the image tag might be ‘Roses for Valentine’s Day’ or something similar that someone may search for.
Meta description – The meta description of a website is what appears under the website name when you use a search engine. It has 160 characters and you can use it to attract people to clicking onto your website. Having a good meta description improves the click through rate for the site.
Backlinks – Search engines also recognise what websites you link to. If you link through to reputable websites then this will help your SEO performance. Always make sure that you are linking to relevant pages that are useful to the reader, rather than adding links that have nothing to do with your content. As well as giving you scores for good SEO, you can also get penalised if you are doing something that the search engines don’t like.
That is a very high level view of SEO but should give you a basic understanding of how to get your website featured higher up in the search engines.
