If you have a local business, you may find SEO easy or difficult depending on what your site is about, its purpose and how committed you are to optimizing your web pages for search engines. For search engine optimization to work, you need to be aware of the best practices. We’ll cover a few tips below to help you get started.
Keyword-rich links
First things first, take note of your site’s permalink structure. Make sure you are using keywords in your URLs to identify your web pages instead of numbers and dates.
Boost page load times
Page load times have a huge impact on your SEO. Anything that bogs down your site including heavy images, flash graphics and music players needs to go. Get rid of any plugins you don’t need to make your web pages load a lot faster.
Keyword-rich images
You need to ensure your image title and descriptions as well as all the attributes, have the necessary keywords. Check out your image file names and ensure they contain necessary keywords.
Update content frequently
Whenever you update content on your website, you increase its chances of ranking higher. Search engines prefer sites with dynamic content as opposed to those with static content. That’s why it’s important to have blog and update posts on a regular basis.
Write for humans not robots
Quality content is good for SEO. If you decide to start blogging, your focus should be to grow an audience and pull traffic organically to your blog. Spammy techniques like keyword stuffed articles, generic and boring content that doesn’t resonate well with your audience doesn’t work. Search engines prefer content that people share, like and comment.
Target search phrases, not single keywords
It’s better to target a keyword phrase as opposed to a single word because it’s not only likely to pull in a more targeted customer but also has a lower competition hence your chances of ranking for it increase. Adding your location to the keyword is often recommended as it helps you to be found easily for local searches.
Quality link building is key
Link building is important in SEO but it needs to be done right. Focus on getting good, authoritative links from websites that are relevant to yours. Many poor quality links can do more harm than good. For instance, if your business is in , then link to sites that are related to this area as well as to the main topic.
Most importantly, make sure your site is easy to use. This will influence other factors like bounce rate and popularity which ultimately affect your ranking.