If you aren’t already utilizing the powerful advertising strategy of search engine optimization, now is your chance to learn more about how you can begin a search engine optimization campaign for your website.
The first step is to complete ALL on-page search engine optimization first, and then once that is complete, you can begin the more involved steps of completely off-page tactics. Here are five steps for you to follow to complete your on-page SEO steps:
Step 1: Complete Title Tags
While some say that title tags and heading tags are no longer relevant, I’m a strong believer that they can’t hurt your SEO campaign. So think of keywords and key phrases that users will be searching for in order to find your website. Use these keywords and key phrases in the title tags, meta tags, and heading tags.
Step 2: Create Meaningful Content
I’m a strong believer that just because you have an article that contains 27 of the keywords or key phrases for your website, if the article has no meaningful content, then it’s completely useless to the visitor. You want to include keywords/key phrases (don’t over do it though – include about 5-10 keywords/key phrases per 500 words), and use these opportunities to show off your knowledge in your field.
Step 3: Utilize Internal Linking
Linking to outside sources is a great way to improve your SEO rankings, but that is an off-page SEO tactic. One on-page strategy that most don’t consider crucial is to link internally within your website. This is a great way to improve your SEO campaign. Link blog posts to other blog posts within your website. Just ensure that none of the links are broken links, as this will harm your rankings.
Step 4: Plan a Clean Navigational Structure
You want to aim to provide a clean looking website and that includes having it structured so that the visitors can easily navigate through it. You want to have a menu at the top that is simple to understand and easy to navigate. Keep your header menu as clean as possible, and any links that there isn’t room for in the header, you can put in the footer menu. Don’t forget to create a Google XML Sitemap – VERY important for your SEO campaign and good for navigation.
Step 5: Always Use Image Alt Tags
Many SEO professionals shrug off this task, but it’s KEY. Using image alt tags is a huge issue because some visitors who have image-disablers on their browsers won’t be able to view images on your web page – therefore, they depend on the image alt tags to get an idea of what the web page is discussing.
Still not convinced you should be utilizing SEO as an advertising channel for your business? Check out this blog post, 5 Reasons Local Businesses Should Be Utilizing SEO.