Starting a business while at university or right after graduation is one of the hardest tasks you can undergo. With financial restraint and almost no working experience, you may encounter an array of problems that can diminish your confidence in success.
But don’t be alarmed about the upcoming challenges – there are multiple factors that contribute to your business’s success, and one of them is SEO, which stands for ‘search engine optimization.’ SEO increases the number of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. SEO helps small business become not so small. Think of your favorite blogger or social media influencer – chances are, they are implementing various SEO strategies on their personal website that helped boost them to where they are today.
If you’re not a SEO guru – that’s fine. You can begin with some simple tips to boost your SEO and expand your effort as time goes on. Here are few quick and easy SEO tips that will get you on your way to driving traffic to your website
SEO Check for broken links
Have you ever visited a website and ended up on a 404 error page? Broken links chase visitors away and hurt your SEO as well as your business. When the number of web visitors decreases, the search engines will assume that your website does not provide a good user experience. Eventually, search engines will give your site a lower rank in a Google search.
Luckily, there is a reliable way to check for broken links. Eminent SEO created a link extractor tool that scans a web page and notifies of any broken links. With Eminent SEO’s tool, you don’t need to manually search for dead links. Keeping track of a web page’s links is crucial to maintaining a site’s overall health.
Implement Important and Relevant Keywords for your SEO
Multitasking businessman at work
Making a list of SEO keywords is one of the most important steps. SEO keywords are words that describe the content of your page, and choosing appropriate ones will go a long way towards making your website rank higher. To figure out what the most effective keywords will be for your specific business, you will need to predict what words people are going to type in the search engine to find your web page. You can use Google Keyword Planner to help generate ideas for keywords.
Also, use keywords in your image alt text description. Once again, they need to reflect your site topic and content.
Have other websites linked to you
An inbound link is a link that comes from another site to your site. Inbound links drive traffic to your website and are essential to SEO. If someone posts a link to your page on their website or blog, their readers might click on it. Generally, the more links that refer to your site, the higher it will rank in search engine results pages. However, Google’s algorithm is constantly shifting, and there are many other factors that contribute to search rankings. Quantity over quality is NOT necessarily the case for link building.
The bummer is that you can’t force anyone to refer to your page. Or, at least you shouldn’t. However, you can link to others, especially when you do it in a consistent, opportunity-driven way. There is a great likelihood that bloggers will return the favor. Also, creating great content that people will be happy to link to will definitely help – we are living in the age of inbound marketing and content curation!
Avoid duplicate content that will affect SEO
When there are multiple pieces of similar content in more than one location on the Internet, it becomes hard for the search engines to determine which version is more relevant to a given search query. Ultimately, the site owner can suffer rankings and traffic losses.
Take advantage of social media to boost SEO
Social media has potentially had an enormous impact on your search rankings. Share your new blog post or news on social media. You should also add social sharing buttons to your site, so the readers can easily access it. Don’t go crazy with dozens of platforms. Stick with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whatever you think would target best your viewers. If your consumers primarily use a certain platform, then make sure you are active on that platform. This may take some research.
The above five-point checklist does not include everything a person needs to know about SEO. However, following this checklist and doing more research about what would work best for your business will get you ahead of the competition. Just remember that as good as your SEO is, don’t expect quick results. SEO is a long-term strategy, and it will take some time to produce results, especially in a competitive field.