The way you have your website come up higher in results on Google is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is one of the number one things you need to do to grow your website because it’s crucial for two things specifically.
- Being able to be put in front of your customer at the exact time they are searching for what you are offering.
- Your customer took action to find you (hot traffic), meaning they’re super likely to take action on whatever it is your product, service, or offer is– you want to be first in line, not your competitor.
This makes website visitors who come to your site via SEO much more likely to convert into actual paying customers. The thing about SEO is that it is changing frequently and has gotten people confused on how to do it for their websites.
In this tutorial, we will go over the basics that have stayed for the most part consistent. These will get you quite far into your effort to get traffic from Google.
WEBSITES LINKING TO YOUR WEBSITE (BUILDING LINKS)
Ahh… I bet you’ve heard of this one. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything. I am a strong proponent of doing things legitly (white-hat). Google is very smart on catching spammy tactics. When you try to outsmart them, you’ll lose 99% of the time. Google’s algorithm takes into account the kind of sites linking to your site and how reputable those sites are. If thousands of different sites link to a site, then that can be a sign that many people think a site is worthwhile. On the other hand, if no one links to a site then the site is probably not that worthwhile yet. One of the top factors determining if a site linking to you, is benefiting you is whether the site it’s coming from is relevant to your site’s topic, and the quality of that site.
Example: If www.forbes.com links to you in a news story or your towns biggest news station, then that is a great link. But if a site like www.imspam2018.com links to you, then that would not benefit your site at all. If a spammy site links to you, this would actually be more likely to hurt you than to help in Google eyes.
Some ways to build links are getting PR (press releases linking your website) for your business, giving value on another person’s blog (guest blogging), interviews (the interviewers can link you afterward on their site), answer www.QUORA.com queries (link your website), or networking with the owners of websites involved with your topic (linking to each other).
The biggest takeaway is don’t build low-quality links. They are more likely to damage your site than to benefit it in the long run. Google has some of the smartest engineers in the world constantly improving their platform.
CREATE HIGH-QUALITY PAGES
Google not only considers your overall site but also each individual page in deciding whether to rank that page higher in the rankings of Google searches pertaining to your topic.
Tips for creating a high-quality page:
- It must cover the topic it is about in depth.
- Use rich media like videos, photos, or other embedded rich media when possible.
- Have at least over 300 words on the page as well.
- Don’t just add words to fill space, make the text helpful to the overall page (more text the better).
TARGET KEYWORDS
With every page that you want to rank in Google, you’re going to want to target exact match keywords that people search for. Choose keywords to rank for that are commonly searched for and also ones that are not overly competitive. More often than not, if the term is too competitive, you won’t be able to rank in the top 10 at least not for a while.
Tips for optimizing a web page for “Rental Cars in Florida” :
- Include relevant keywords in a number of high-attention areas on your site,
- Include them everywhere from the titles and body text of your pages to your URLs to your meta tags to your image file names.
- Using the keyword in the title of the page
- Using the keyword in the URL (example, yoursite.com/Florida/Cars/Rental)
- Using the keyword, and variations/synonyms (example, rental cars in Florida: rental automobiles Florida: rental motor vehicles Florida, rental vehicles in Florida), throughout the page, but don’t over do it.
- Using the keyword in the meta description, also included them in the meta tags.
- Using the keyword in any image ALT text and in any images paths
- Using the keyword as the anchor text in links back to the page from elsewhere on the site