Ignite Your Business with My SEO Tips!
I’m sure that you’ve visited websites that read… a little bit oddly.
They keep mentioning the same word or phrase over and over again. “If you’re looking for the best car repair in West Palm Beach, Florida, then you will want to visit our West Palm Beach car repair shop. We offer the best car repair service in West Palm Beach, Florida. WEST PALM BEACH!!!”
This kind of search engine optimization is a holdover from the early days of search engines. Back then, they could be fooled into thinking that your site was a leading one simply by stuffing it with as many repeated keywords as possible. Thank heavens that search engines have evolved! Today, they look at sites contextually, seeing how often they are updated and the readability of the web copy.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a bit of an art form to make sure that your website is at the top of the Google search results. How is the SEO on your website? And could a digital marketing/virtual assistant improve it?
Keywords
Using keywords is about as basic as you can get when it comes to SEO tips.
Keywords and phrases are things that the average person searches for. Let’s say that someone is looking for Dog Grooming in West Palm Beach. If you’re a dog groomer within a reasonable distance of that area, “Dog Grooming in West Palm Beach” should appear somewhere on your homepage, blogs, meta descriptions, and image alt-tags.
Now, as I showed above, you can go overboard with this. Every second sentence can’t be that keyword. Instead, switch it up with others that make sense and then work them organically into your web copy. If you ever read something on your homepage and think, “Huh, that sounds a bit awkward,” then you should probably change it.
Writing effective web copy can be an art. You need to strike the right balance between personality infused readability and SEO. That’s one of the reasons why my clients hire me to revamp and redesign their websites. I can rewrite the web copy on their site to read better AND rank higher in search engine results.
Have Quality Content
Alongside repeating the same words, there was another trick that old websites used to use to promote their website: posting useless content. They would put up useless and tedious-to-read content that took about five minutes to write to fool search engines into thinking that the website was updated with content. Thank heavens that search engines are smarter than they used to be!
Today, that kind of trick would result in a website’s ranking going down. Google expects your content to be well-written, useful, and unique. In other words, your content has to serve your audience, not try to serve the search engine algorithm.
The problem here is that creating quality content takes time. A 1000-word blog can easily take hours; even more, if you aren’t an experienced copywriter. By hiring a digital marketer/virtual assistant, you can have an expertly-crafted piece of content to post to your website every single week. This will boost your SEO score in a way that more frequent, but lower quality updates will not.
[TWEET ” Is your website ranking low in the search results? Give it a boost with my easy-to-do SEO tips! “]
Link Building
Nowadays, it’s rare to find a blog that doesn’t contain any links in it. That’s because Google loves when sites link to themselves and others within a piece of content.
Take this blog, for example. Imagine that I’m talking about my Webinar Services (shameless plug)! By linking internally to that page, I’m ringing Google’s SEO bell. Similarly, if I link to an internal blog about webinars and how effective they are at engaging your audience, that will ring another SEO bell. And linking to an external blog that has nothing to do with your site, but includes similar content, is even better!
The golden standard, of course, is to have your blog be linked to by someone else. This is pretty much out of your hands, requiring your content to be top-notch. If you feel that an outside eye could improve your content, I’d suggest giving me a call!
The absolute last thing you ever want to do is to pay someone to link to your blog. This blackhat SEO technique can backfire spectacularly, destroying your SEO ranking if Google ever discovers it.
Fix Broken Pages
If it’s been a few years since you last revamped your website, a few things may have broken since then. Broken links can disrupt the user experience on your website, and Google hates them too! If you have a ton of broken links on your website, it’s going to hurt your SEO score.
One way to fix this is to hire me to do a complete website audit. I go through every single page on your site, reading through your copy, checking out your calls to action, and confirming that all the links go where they are supposed to. You’ll get a full audit report of everything that could be improved. At that point, you can take care of everything yourself, or you could always hire me to fix your site up better than new!
User Experience
Speaking of the user experience of your site, content isn’t the only thing that Google ranks for. If your site is a buggy, broken, slow mess, it doesn’t matter what kind of content you’re providing; Google will still drop it down dozens of pages.
How quickly does your website load? If it takes a ton of time, even on a high-speed connection, you might want to reconsider your web hosting solution. Sites should be optimized to load as quickly as possible, minimizing the time that your users are sitting looking at a blank screen.
You also want to use a mobile-friendly, responsive design.
Trying to navigate a full desktop-style website on a phone can be a nightmare. There is just too much stuff to fit on the small screen. By embracing mobile-friendly design, your site will automatically adjust to the size of the screen it is viewed upon. This makes the overall user experience much smoother, as many people almost exclusively browse the internet on their phones and handheld devices.
[TWEET ” Effective search engine optimization is a moving target, but you can hit it dead center with my SEO tips!”]
SEO optimization is a constantly moving target. Google and its competitors are always updating their parameters and algorithms to provide the best results for their users. One of the best ways to rank high is to give your entire website a look under a microscope to make sure everything is working correctly. A great way to start this process is with my free Ultimate Step-by-Step Website Audit workbook!
Of course, if you’d instead just do the important work that only you can do at your business, I could take care of that for you. SEO tips are one of my specialties, and I would be happy to give your website an SEO boost that will have it shooting up the search results! If you’d like to learn more, contact me today for a free consultation and I’ll explain everything to you about the confusing and confounding world of SEO!
