Basic SEO Steps to Start Ranking Your Website Today

10 Simple SEO Strategies to Boost Organic Traffic

SEO (search engine optimization) is the fuel that powers your website to its goal of attracting traffic. Without taking a few basic SEO steps, your site won’t even get off the starting line. No traffic means no sales. Don’t believe me? Look at these 2021 SEO statistics:

• 93% of online experiences start with a search engine

• 81% of consumers search online before making a large purchase

• 72% of online marketers describe content marketing as their most effective SEO tactic

• 75% of internet users never scroll beyond the first page of their Google search

• 91% of content gets no traffic from Google search

Get your SEO right, and you could get in the 9% of content that receives the organic traffic that engages prospects and leads to sales. Get it wrong, and your website will be among the 91% that are failing. All your time, effort, and investment in an online presence will have been wasted.

What is SEO?

Before we examine how to get your website ranking with just a few basic SEO steps, let’s define what SEO is.

Simply put, it’s the strategy that increases your website’s visibility to search engines and gets your web pages ranked on search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO covers the infrastructure and technical aspects of your website, and, most importantly, your content. Unless you’re a website designer, adept at coding, and have a deep technical knowledge, what you can do to boost you SEO revolves around your content. Fortunately, there are many basic SEO best practices that you can do yourself easily, today, that will help improve your SERP rankings.

1. Deliver a top-quality user experience

Don’t get hung up on keywords. Yes, they are important, and the number one way that web surfers will find your content; but Google has advanced from the days when more repetitions of keywords delivered higher rankings.

Today, Google’s search engine using sophisticated methods to make sure that your pages are delivering a good user experience. You’re equally likely to be downranked for keyword stuffing as you are for including no keywords.

Here is what you must consider when developing your content.

2. Make your content relevant

You may have heard of Google’s secret search engine algorithms. These are formulas and strategies that determine how its spiders and crawlers find your content. They’re getting super clever. They seek out relevant content to a search term – especially when the surfer is using long-tail keywords.

In short, Google wants its users to be satisfied with the results it presents, and so it will check that your content is relevant to the readers. A tip here is to include plenty of latent semantic indexed keywords. Basically, these are words and phrases that would be associated with your primary keywords. (Read more in our article explaining LSI keywords and how to find them.)

3. Publish quality, evergreen content

Make sure that you publish content that people want to read. It must:

• Have sufficient depth of information

• Be unique (absolutely no plagiarism or copying allowed)

• Be a reliable resource

• Deliver content topics that align with the intent of the Google search made

Another tip here is to publish largely evergreen content. News stories that are relevant today may give you quick wins, but they won’t continue to deliver in the future. Evergreen content that retains its relevancy can become the gift that keeps on giving.

4. Heed your headlines

Write headlines that entice surfers to read by showing the intent of the content. The best headlines are around 55 characters long, snappy, and descriptive.

5. Instigate internal links

Internal links are super important. They help readers navigate easily to other relevant content on your site (helping readers to stay longer), reducing bounce rates (and therefore ‘informing’ Google that your content is relevant).

These links also help to build a web between your own content, directing Google’s spiders and crawlers to other pages on your website and helping their rankings.

6. Get backlinks

By providing good-quality, relevant content, you should encourage others to link to your website. Especially if these links come from sites that Google regards as authority sites, this helps to prove your website’s authority.

7. Utilize your URL

Your URL is set automatically, but you should ensure that it includes the keywords you are targeting. Put the most important keywords first, and Google will see these first.

8. Tag your images

Including images helps to make your content more attractive. Don’t miss the opportunity for your images to make your content more attractive to search engines. Always include a relevant alt attribute when you upload an image – search engines don’t ‘see’ images, but they do see your image’s alt tag.

9. Meta description muscle

Write a meta description that describes what your content delivers. This is the wording that you find under your page’s URL in the SERPs, and can encourage a reader to click on your page.

10. Succeed with social media

Linking your content to your social media is another non-technical strategy that helps to increase your website’s visibility. It also helps to draw visitors to your website, especially by positively interacting with others.

Take your first steps to better SEO today

A few steps. That’s all that separates you from the customers you desire. For a deep dive into your SEO, and to improve your online marketing from day one, contact BlabberJax today:

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