10 Essential SEO Tips for Building an Online Presence

Develop an effective SEO action plan with the help of professionals to take your search engine ranking to the next level so you can beat out the competition.

New and old websites alike must constantly be focused on SEO if they hope to drive larger amounts of traffic to their site. To put it into perspective, Google processes over 99,000 searches every single second, equating to over 8.5 billion Internet searches on a daily basis. Google is only one of many search engines, bringing the true total of daily searches to an even higher value.

Creating an SEO strategy can have a drastic impact on the success of your business by simply getting your content in front of more eyes.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

For those unfamiliar with the term, search engine optimization refers to the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a website by using a range of strategies including improving website appearance, speed, and overall web page positioning. An effective SEO strategy is integral to improving not just the number of visitors to your site, but the quality of those visitors.

10 Tips for a Successful SEO Strategy

With so many new web pages being published on a daily basis, getting larger amounts of traffic to your page, especially in a small niche, can feel impossible. Rest assured that with plenty of research and guidance, any website can have strong SEO. Beyond getting SEO guidance to improve your online presence, consider the following 10 tips as you start to create an organizational strategy:

1. Only use high authority links

Whenever you reference information, it’s always important to verify your sources to ensure the information is accurate. This policy is true in day-to-day conversations as well as for blogs, articles, or any type of content. When you cite a statistic, subject matter expert, or anything similar, always make sure the site you link out to has a high domain rating.

2. Don’t create content for search engines

While this tip can seem counterintuitive, it’s one of the most important. Search engines judge the readability of a site for people. They can distinguish between a site that has been written solely for a search engine, and they will downgrade the site if this is determined.

3. Research keywords relevant to your industry

A major aspect of SEO is keyword integration. Identify your overarching niche and use keyword research to determine which are most effective. There are three keyword principles to keep in mind during this research: relevance, authority, and volume.

All keywords used should relate to your niche, but more specifically to the subject of the specific content you are actively creating. Additionally, every keyword needs to make sense and be authoritative in its own right. Finally, a keyword needs to have a high volume, meaning it is searched often, to have the most beneficial SEO impact.

4. Focus on improving site speed

It should go without saying that a slow site speed is one of the quickest ways to have your site dinged by search engines. Page speed is actually one of the direct ranking factors for SEO, meaning it is one of the primary considerations search engines take into account. Check with your web provider to see if they offer measurements for site speed and recommendations how to improve that speed if it is low.

5. Create quality content on a consistent basis

You can throw every relevant keyword under the sun into your content, but if the quality of that content itself is bad then it won’t be successful. Strong and consistent content is the foundation to any SEO strategy. Every other SEO tip is supplemental to this primary factor.

6. Don’t spread yourself too thin

One mistake people often make with SEO is assuming that if they target multiple niches to use multiple keywords, they’re site will rank higher. However, search engines prefer to see that a site has one specific topic that they are a subject matter expert in, as opposed to a jack of all trades.

7. Design, design, design

Formatting your content to improve readability plays a major role in an SEO rating. Use proper headers, smaller paragraphs, photos that break up content, and other design principles to improve the aesthetic of your site.

8. Optimize the images on your website

Search engines don’t just scan content to determine if it’s relevant to a theme, they also scan images. Ensure that every image you use has some sort of correlation to the topic, and perhaps provide a small description under the photo for readability. Additionally, don’t just slap a photo in the middle of your webpage in an awkward way. Put it at the start of an article, before a paragraph begins, or some other natural place.

9. Improve your meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are the tags that you see pop up underneath the title on search results. They inform readers what the link will take them to and a relevant summary of what that page may be about. Don’t write a meta description that has nothing to do with the theme of the page. Put relevant keywords in the meta description, and ensure that the description accurately describes what will be discussed.

10. Use keywords in the right places

Keyword stuffing, or throwing multiple keywords together in an awkward and unreadable manner, is another quick way to have your site’s SEO rating downgraded. Aim to have one keyword in the title and meta description, as well as the introduction and conclusion. Throughout the rest of your content, interlay other keywords sporadically in a natural way, as opposed to throwing them all in the first few sentences.

Why is SEO Strategy Important?

There’s a common misconception that says if you aren’t in the first three search results on Google then you won’t get visitors. While being higher on the page is undoubtedly important, simply getting on that first page should be your starting point. In fact, one quarter of web users will never click past the first search result page that comes up. By getting on the first page, your website will be exposed to 75% of the Internet traffic looking for that topic.

Beat the competition today

Once you have an SEO strategy in place, the most important thing to do in order to grow the traffic to your website is to consistently put out content. Search engine optimization is not some type of overnight trick. To make the most of any SEO strategy takes time, as it requires proving to the search engines that you have a web page of authority and relevant content to your niche.