What You Don’t Know About SEO Can Hurt Your Business

March 30th, 2017 by TCC Leave a reply »

Search engine optimization–the use of keywords and other techniques designed to elevate a website to the top of a search–is the make-or-break factor for many new businesses. It is also the web’s unfolding, and unregulated, frontier.

There are countless SEO strategists, consultants and self-professed experts who will claim they can raise your site up into Google’s top 10 search results–for a price. Unscrupulous SEO firms not only make promises they can’t keep, the worst of them also use shady practices that might produce no traffic, deliver the wrong traffic or even get you banned from Google. For the startup owner who isn’t well versed in SEO, hiring an SEO consultant is one of the more vulnerable moments in launching a new business..

The Right Keywords
Google, of course, is the web-search alpha dog. But all the others Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, Lycos–are sniffing out the same stuff.What gets their attention? Good, fresh, focused content. Adding a blog is one of the easiest and most straightforward ways to bulk up on content. If you sell hair-removal devices, for instance, start a blog that explores all aspects of waxing, plucking, threading, electrolysis and so on. Over time, your site will accrue searchable heft.

The trick is to be hyper-conscious of your keywords. For example, if you want web surfers on the prowl for “eyebrow waxing” to find your site in search engine results, organically work the exact phrase “eyebrow waxing” into each blog post (maybe multiple times), and use it on all static pages related to eyebrow waxing. Lather, rinse and repeat with every term and phrase you want to rank for.

Before you start writing content, though, research and plan your keyword attack. Is geography important to finding your customers? Then maybe “Connecticut eyebrow waxing” is the phrase you want to home in on. How do you size up keyword quality? One method is to use Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool , which reveals how many monthly searches are conducted for a word or phrase. If a search term produces more than 50,000 searches in a month, it will be difficult for your site to compete for Google’s attention using that word or phrase. But you can also use AdWords like a thesaurus: It handily delivers a list of alternatives for you to sift through to find lower-volume, but more focused, keyword phrases. Using those, you’ll have a better chance of rising up the ranks. Google also has a search-keyword tool that will scan your existing site and suggest keywords.

Relevant Page Titles
So now it’s page titles–the line of text that appears at the top of your web browser–that are believed to be the most important few words in the SEO universe. (The title is also what shows up on Google’s search result.) A page title tag field is standard on most blog programs, including TypePad and WordPress ; any web programmer should be able to customize one for sites built on Drupal or Joomla , two popular content management systems. Another place to plant keywords is each page’s description field. Customize the description for each page of your site, and write them with some care, because the first 120 characters show up on Google, tucked between the page title and address. Plugging keywords into all these critical spots is time-consuming–but it isn’t rocket science. Getting it done, even if you need to update existing pages, shouldn’t be expensive.

Getting the Links
So what might be a good use of your SEO dollars? One word: Links. Google uses about 200 data points when sizing up your website. But one of them is whether you’re popular with the in crowd. If reputable websites link to your content, Google smiles upon you.

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