Looking to improve your website rankings in the search engines? Great, you’re in the right place! Read on to learn our most valuable SEO tips to help you dominate the competition.
The times may have changed in many ways over the last several centuries but some things still remained the same. In the market centers of days gone by, people would shout their wares at the top of their voices. All this was in a bid to attract customers to their stalls and drive sales. Call it advertising.
Then came the newspapers where business that could afford to put up advertisements did. As technology slowly made things different for different people, this form of putting out your business into the general pubic moved to the radio and to the television.
The thing with technology is it doesn’t come to a rest at one innovation or invention, it moves forward to the next thing that can be done, the next challenge to be solved. That’s how the internet was born; a way to solve a problem that has plagued researchers.
Soon enough, everyone was walking around with a portable device in their hands. This presented a new opportunity to intrepid entrepreneurs and the e-commerce boom grew larger as the years went by. What this meant is that every other business person out there wanted to put their products and services online to reach everyone.
This resulted in stiff competition, especially when it comes to search engine optimization. What does this mean for you?
Well, you just need to get a few things right if you want to blow your competition out of the water. Claiming that number one spot on search engine results page as your own is just a matter of a well-executed strategy. Here are a few SEO tips to help you dominate your competition in 2020.
Stay Up to Date with The Latest SEO Tips and Information
Search Engine Optimization is a big part of why the search engine results pages appear the way they do. A search engine will try and give the user a response that is as close as possible to the answer that they were looking for. And since it is an algorithm that is responsible for ranking, it therefore means that it has been programmed to look for certain things.
Usually, web developers and SEO practitioners will get to learn of these things, and then implement them on their websites. There’s also the little matter of search engine updating their algorithms, which results in serious changes for websites. Some may gain, some may lose… terribly.
Here is where staying abreast with the latest information will keep your website afloat. Google updates have been known to sink entire businesses just by making little changes in the algorithm. By staying in touch with all this news, then you get to be prepared should an update threaten your website.
Staying informed also has the added advantage of teaching you new things. The world of SEO is constantly changing. As such, the techniques that were used, even less than a year ago, may become obsolete, in a short span of time.
In a similar vein, there are new techniques coming out every day. They don’t have to be entirely new, they could be a spin on old techniques to make them work with the new reality of search algorithms. As such, staying abreast of the latest news is a sure way of getting some of the best SEO tips to help you get one up over your competitors.
Research the Competition
If you haven’t read The Art of War by Sun Tzu, then you definitely should grab a copy as soon as possible. You are not going to literal war with your competitors, but it’s their hearts and minds that are of importance to you. Therefore, your efforts to get one over your competitors should have military precision.
One of the quotes from this book that would be of great importance to you is about knowledge. To paraphrase, if you have complete knowledge of yourself and your competitors, you have no need to fear what will come. If you have knowledge of yourself but not the competitor, with every step you make, you will have a loss. If you have no knowledge of yourself, or your competitors, then you will suffer defeat.
With this in mind, the first thing you should do when it comes to planning your SEO is to conduct a thorough look into how your competitors are operating. With comprehensive research, you get to see the strengths of your competitors. You also get to see their weaknesses.
This will give you absolutely vital insight into how you should conduct your SEO. This is because you have a clear idea of what you need to do to get to their level, and surpass them. It also means that you can take advantage of their weaknesses and use them to boost your business.
With this knowledge at hand, go forth and make your competitors weep.
Conduct Thorough Keyword Analysis
Yes, you want to build an online business, or you already have one and want to put it at the top of the world. After you’ve conducted the research on your competitors, it’s now time to find out where it is that you are, and what you can do to get you to where you want to be.
One of those things will be keyword research. Yes, these are not the days of old where you would just open up a business and hope that customers will come. You have a variety of tools available to you to help you make prudent decisions as you build your business.
One of these tools that you will use will be a keyword research tool. Before you build your web presence, or even if you’ve already done so, you can check out keywords that relate to your business. There is no point putting in keywords that no one is searching for.
The entire purpose of SEO is to make you visible to search engine users. Your website, no matter how well built, won’t show up if it does not provide an answer to the phrases that a user is searching for.
When conducting your research, think about three types of keywords. The first is evergreen keywords. This will have your site be relevant for years. The second type is longtail keywords. These are three to five-word phrases. These are excellent for quality traffic. The third type are buyer intent keywords. These are keywords that a user would likely search for when they are at the end of the research process and ready to make a purchase.
Content is King
A lot of users who put their queries into social media aren’t looking for a product or service that will solve their problem; they are looking for a way to solve that problem as they don’t understand how to. They might also know of ways to solving problems, but they are looking for fresh ways, or different ways to do things depending on the circumstance.
Here is where content comes in. With a simple blog article with content optimized for SEO, you could help someone out there understand how to solve a certain problem, and then advise them on the best ways to solve that problem. With that one article, you have helped someone, and if you did it right, you will have promoted your product or service. Chances are, a sale followed soon after.
One good thing to remember is that the content you create should be geared towards helping actual humans, and not to fool search engines that you have content. In fact, if they do find that your website has thin content, or you are using a lot of keywords to draw their attention, it may draw a penalty from them.
Another thing is that if your content is always fresh and engaging, then search engines will notice this and give you a boost up the search engine results pages. Fresh content indicates to a search engine that you are actively working on your website.
On the people side, the more people read your content, the more likely they are to share it. What this means is that you will have a natural accumulation of backlinks, which are excellent for the growth of your website.
Everything should be optimized
The whole purpose of SEO is to get your website onto search engine results pages. With the keywords that you collected while doing your research, you came to find that you have a great number of them at your disposal, you just need to use the ones that will bring in most of the traffic to your website.
And no, you won’t use these keywords in one blogpost, or on the homepage of your website. You have to target every little element of your website. The first place to start is your headings, subheadings and your images.
Your headings, whether H1 all through to H6 should all have a keyword in them to improve your chances of ranking. This is because search engines mostly consider your headings to be more important than the content that’s on your page. And yes, search engines are capable of providing search results as images, and this comes from the title and alt tags that accompany an image on a website.
And while at it, also don’t forget to optimize your meta tags. These meta tags will enable search engine robots make out what is on the page.
There’s so much more than these five. They are the fundamentals and you will need more to help you craft a superb website for both the business and the leads you are targeting. For more, you can read through more of what Innovative Hosting has to give.
Conclusion
We hope you have found these SEO tips helpful and that they help improve your search engine rankings. If you need help with your SEO, we would love to work with you and are proud to offer affordable SEO services.
