SEO, for Search Engine Optimization (or “search engine optimization”), can be a rather obscure concept for those who are not familiar with the practices of marketing and SEO online, it can seem damn technical and a bit intimidating. It’s important to know what is seo for business growth ?
But if you take a closer look, you will see that these are quite simply tools to improve the visibility of your website on search engines like Google. Everyone can learn, in just a few steps, how to start and manage this optimization of your site and your communication, what is seo techniques ?
Having an effective SEO strategy in place allows your business to reach more potential customers by targeting them better. Let the customers find you. This is a key catchphrase in online content marketing. By optimizing the SEO of your business with relevant, quality content, and using the tips below, you can improve your organic traffic, in other words increase the number of visitors for whom there is no need to pay (unlike traditional marketing).
This is because there are two types of traffic: paid traffic and organic (free) traffic. Improving your SEO practices precisely improves your ability to generate organic traffic, that is, to be found online by potential customers, naturally. This introduction finished, let’s get down to business!
So, what is SEO?
As I mentioned above, SEO consists of a set of techniques aimed at improving the position of your website in the search engine results. Because there are a multitude of search engines: if Google, Yahoo, Bing hold the top of the podium, engines.
Why is this so important? Imagine you own an online store or manage an e-commerce platform: the success of your business will depend primarily on the web.
Smart SEO management can be the key to your business success. The volume of online purchases is growing exponentially, not only in France, but all over the world. The Internet is becoming the first place people go for information before buying in a brick-and-mortar store. For this reason, knowing how to stand out and reach out to potential customers is essential. A solid SEO strategy can help make this happen.
So how do you design and implement an effective SEO strategy?
The 10 tips about SEO for business growth
1. Each page must include your theme
This is a fundamental aspect of good SEO. Each page of your site should evoke the heart of your business. If you own a jewelry store, each page should cover the subject of jewelry. If it is a cleaning company, then cleaning should come first.
Why does it have to be on every page? Quite simply because a search engine will regularly inspect your website. We will talk about web-crawling when an engine sucks up the content of a page and web-scraping when it extracts precise information from the data retrieved during crawling.
If every page on your site has a clear topic, the search engine will analyze that there is a good chance that a user will find relevant content on your site that matches their search. And your site will have every chance to climb in the results of a search on the engine.
2. Choosing the right keywords
All businesses use keywords that characterize their business – these are terms that help define what the business is and that potential customers are likely to search for on the web. At Debitoor for example, our keywords are: invoicing, accounting, invoice template, etc.
How do you know which words to choose? Customers who are looking for a specific service or product will generally use common, common terms. So it’s easy to find several out of the box, but it may be worth your while to do your little investigation and see what comes up most often in your industry. Tools like Google AdWords (free!) Are even there to help!
3. Use keywords in meta titles
Once you have a list of keywords, it is important to include them on your site, and in particular include them in the meta titles. Search engines do pay special attention to the title you assign to a page because it is a short description of the page’s content.
If you don’t have a lot of SEO skills, meta titles and meta descriptions are things you’ve probably dealt with without really noticing. However, these are essential elements of a web page. Since it is texts that appear in search results, their role is crucial: they can decide someone to enter your site or to prefer the next occurrence.
Suddenly, each meta-title must refer to a relevant keyword, which corresponds to the term of the industry in which your company is part. Last thing, to be effective, the meta-titles should contain between 60 and 70 characters (spaces included).
4. The importance of meta descriptions!
A meta description is the text you will find just below the page title in search results: it aims to give a clearer idea of what users will find on that specific page. To get the best results, it’s important to maximize this space. Make sure your meta descriptions are clear and consistent, and don’t exceed 160-170 characters (including spaces).
5. Use keywords in the headers
In addition to meta titles, care should be taken to also use relevant keywords on the page of the site itself. Headers are particularly important in this sense, not only to facilitate the scraping (see definition above) of the page and therefore the referencing on search engines.
Headers make the page more readable and structured, and are much preferable to a thick, unbroken block of text. Search engines pay a lot of attention to the headers of web pages!
While it may seem that the more keywords you put in the better, it’s a matter of striking a balance: a search engine like Google will penalize a site that looks artificially keyword boosted.
6. Use keywords in alt text of images
And you thought we were done with the keywords? Nay! Not only does the alt-text (or ALT-text) in your image match the text that will appear when the mouse hovers over the image, it is also analyzed by search engines and helps them understand what the image represents.
7. Insert keywords in your URLs
The URL (for Uniform Resource Locator), commonly called “web address” in French, is a set of characters that will uniquely identify a page. So the URL is usually made up of terms related to what your site has to offer. If the URL of your graphic design firm’s home page (for example) does not explicitly contain the words “graphic design”, you may consider adding them to the URL of another page on the site.
8. Add links to keywords
Inserting links to other pages (on your site or external sites) is essential for good SEO. Indeed the links and the anchor text (which corresponds to the text on which the link is inserted) is also important to optimize its referencing.
And what is anchor text optimization? Already to avoid the over-use of texts such as “Click here!” or promotional messages that have nothing to do with your industry. Effective anchor text contains words that are consistent with the page they are redirecting to and the keywords used.
9. Duplicate or copy content: the thing NOT to do
Reusing or copying content is problematic, not only from a criminal and intellectual honesty point of view in terms of plagiarism (if the copied content is from another site / author), but also for SEO issues. . Search engines like Google seriously penalize sites posting copy-paste content, between two pages on the same site, and between two different sites.
If you have an online store, it can be difficult to create new content, especially when it comes to product descriptions, for example. However, it is important to at least try to rephrase these descriptions when they appear several times on the site.
10. Create and share quality content regularly
Here is an element to have in mind from the launch of your website (and suddenly, sorry to mention it at the very end!): Content is king, because without good content, your SEO strategy has no words- keys or titles to rely on.
Perhaps the worst thing you can do for your SEO is to neglect the content you create and post on your site. Because if your content includes terms that are commonly searched, search engines will pick it up and are likely to rank you better in search results. You shouldn’t underestimate the effectiveness of social media in SEO for your business either. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. are powerful tools to drive more traffic to your site, helping to further improve its position in search results.
If you’ve made it this far but want more information on the topic, then googling “SEO guide to getting started” for example: you’ll find plenty of sites and platforms that will get you started on the right foot.
It’s also important to stay on top of what’s new in SEO. The guidelines and practices to be adopted are constantly changing. And SEO methods you learned two years ago may well have changed since.
Good luck !
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