3 Ways to Boost Search Engine Visibility
Visibility is important online—your site might as well not exist if no one can find it. This is bad no matter your goals. Whether you’re spreading awareness or selling products, you want your website to attract people receptive to your message. That’s where search engine optimization comes in. SEO allows you to see content, design, and links as parts of a whole, with everything dedicated to ranking on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. These are the gatekeepers of the Internet. You’ll need their cooperation if you want to reach your target market.
1. Constant Updating
Website optimization is more than a single day’s work. Finding the right keywords, producing good content, and updating regularly aren’t one-time projects. They’re ongoing concerns. Keeping your website fresh is important. If you update frequently, search engines will notice and will crawl your site more often. Tracking the success of your SEO program (and making adjustments) is also crucial to long-term success.
2. Good Fresh Content
Keywords are of course the makings of effective content. You can’t expect web spiders to find your website unless it contains relevant terms. You also can’t reach your audience unless you use the same vocabulary. However, content creation doesn’t stop with Google Adwords. There’s more to it than identifying the right words and phrases. When writing website copy, you’ve got to use those keywords as a framework. Rather than adding them to articles that have little to do with the subject matter, the keywords should instead be present at the beginning. They should be baked-in, not sprinkled on the finished product. Web copy should always be enlightening, entertaining, or otherwise engaging. A holistic approach to keywords will ensure this.
3. Excellent Links
PageRank is a numbered score based on a page’s inbound and outbound links. It helps search engines determine how trustworthy a website is. Basically, your website’s importance is determined by the quality and quantity of the sites that link to it. Link-building is therefore an important part of SEO. To monitor your PageRank, you can download a browser plugin such as PageRank Status for Chrome. To raise it, you can start by linking your site to your social media presence, especially Google+. Don’t do anything black-hat, but try to get listed with free open directories like DMOZ and with professional groups in your industry. Internal links are just as valuable as outbound links, so revisit your menu structure or insert a link footer to ensure that each page links to all the other pages. Meticulous linking will increase the time that spiders spend on your site.