11 SEO TECHNIQUES


They don't have to be complicated to be effective


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11 SEO TECHNIQUES –
THEY DON’T HAVE TO BE COMPLICATED TO BE EFFECTIVE

Small Business SEO Tips

The art of growing your site traffic can be difficult to master, and the thought of it alone can be pretty daunting. There are literally hundreds of small business seo tips and tricks out there you can try, but my guess is you don’t have a lot of time to scour through sites and blogs for days on end.

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The best way to increase Free traffic to your site is to use easy to implement SEO strategies, like adding more web pages, for example. Let’s take a deeper look at what you can do to achieve a higher amount of website traffic:

1) Add More Web Pages

Adding more web pages to your site means in theory you’ll get more traffic, because the pages will trigger more search terms and you’ll be visible for more search queries. Each page you add should be unique, relevant and high quality in order for it to be effective.

2) Add High(er) Quality Content

High quality content is an essential SEO strategy if you want to get more traffic to your site. However, research suggests that the pages that commonly rank on page one of Google are not only high quality, but have a high word count too – approximately 2000 words or more. This means you must focus on producing high quality, in depth content which will still be readable years from now.

If you're struggling to come up with good content we've put together a content marketing guide you can read which includes brainstorming content ideas in chapter 3 and how to promote your content once it goes live. in chapter 5.

Also worth noting is that more and more people are now digesting information in different ways including audio and video which is reported to have even higher retention and conversion rates than readable content.

Videos can be uploaded to Youtube and embedded in content to keep your users engaged while sending lower bounce rate signals to the search engines. You could add the option of audio to your posts or create a separate podcast on any given topic. Here are 6 tips to help with building a solid podcast seo strategy.

3) Schedule A Consistent Writing Schedule

Quantity isn’t the goal here; quality is, as mentioned before. However, it will benefit you to set up a consistent writing schedule and stick to it. The more you practice writing great posts, the better you’ll get at it.

Don’t worry about what you write at first either; as the saying goes, ‘write drunk, edit sober’. This allows you to get all of your thoughts down on the page and then go back and make it perfect later on. If you can commit to writing just 2 posts per week, that will be a great help in increasing your traffic!

4) Do Go Guest Blogging

Don’t think that the only way to get more traffic is to write quality content for your own sites – you can also try guest blogging on the most authoritative sites you can muster to gain even more fans, followers and sharers. If you can network with bloggers relevant in your industry and get the chance to write a guest blog for them, you’ll be exposed to all of their traffic. The other blogger may even write a post for your site, which can benefit you both!

5) Do Go Commenting On Blog Posts

Blog commenting may be one of those small business seo tips you might think serves little purpose these days but that’s far from true. Commenting on blog posts with something useful, e.g a solution to a problem or another insight into the subject, can still help you to become more well known and get you more clicks. Many people post generic comments or similar comments on lots of blog posts, but it’s much more effective to write a targeted comment mentioning something specific and add value to the post.

6) Conduct More Targeted Keyword Research

Keywords are extremely valuable when it comes to SEO and getting more traffic, so you need to work out how relevant your web pages are to a user searching for those keywords.

Although somebody selling shoes might want to use the more generic term ‘shoes’, it’s very competitive, expensive, and won’t be the best option for increasing your traffic. Instead, you need to make your keywords more targeted, for example; ‘cheap womens shoes’ or ‘handmade leather shoes’.

7) GET A Responsive Web Design

A responsive web design will increase your traffic vastly; there’s no doubt about it. More people are opting to use mobiles and tablets over desktops nowadays, so of course it makes sense to ensure your visitors are going to be able to view your site and have a great experience while there, no matter what device they come in on.

8)Make Unique Infographic Designs

Infographics are an effective form of content marketing, but to bring them into the 21st century you need to make sure you have a truly unique design that’s amazing to look at.

Although a regular infographic will help you to get more traffic and backlinks, one with an outstanding design will increase them so much more. Get creative with your designs; why not see if you can make the graphics move? You could even have a designer create an attractive 3D infographic, which is worth it even if it is pricey!

9) Make Unique Infographic Designs

The speed your website loads can have a serious effect on your rankings. Google actually found that when they listed slow sites towards the top of the listing pages, people had a poor user experience and decreased their use of Google as a result!

Just a tenth of a second can matter in this situation, as Amazon found out when they lost 1% of their revenue after their site slowed down – imagine how much that is for a billion dollar company?

10) Create Social Media Accounts

If you haven’t already got social media accounts on some of the most popular platforms, you’re missing out. On Facebook and Twitter, there are approximately 1.3 billion users – imagine the amount of people that could be sharing your posts, liking your page, interacting with you! There are also platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. To get you started here’s a quick linkedin tutorial for setting up your company page.

The best thing to do is work out where your target audience are most likely to be, and focus on those platforms. Post content regularly like you would your blog, and try to interact with your audience as much as possible by asking questions and replying to comments in a timely manner.

Remember, social media shouldn’t just be considered another way to promote yourself, it should be a place people can get to know your brand and interact with you, keeping you in the forefront of their minds by default. You can do things like host a question and answer session on Twitter, and run competitions for likes and shares on Facebook.

Don’t forget to include social media integration on your website either!>/p>

11) Add Meta Data To Your Pages and Posts

One aspect plenty of business owners overlook is the formulation of meta data for published posts and pages which is a huge mistake and wasted opportunity.

That's why it's recommended to include popular keywords with high relevance in the title and an enticing description with a strong call-to-action instead of leaving the search engines to auto-generate random text off the page.

As Google and other search engines use click-through data in their algorithm to measure relevance, it's obviously pays to have a higher click-through rate as this combined with increased dwell time can help to improve page rankings, and therefore increase the number of visitors coming to the website.

Adding alt tags to images is also another worthwhile exercise as this can add further relevance to a page and help it to rank for more keywords.

The small business seo tips outlined above will help you to see a notable increase in your traffic providing you’re consistent and focused on quality. A great user experience will always keep visitors coming back for more!

Shane McEvoy is a seasoned SEO and inbound marketing expert with nearly 30 years of experience in advertising. He established Flycast Media, a specialist B2B digital agency, and is a published author of two well-received guides while contributing to several industry publications - read his complete profile here.

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