Perhaps you have heard about SEO or search engine optimization – and you’ve also understood its importance to reaching more customers and growing your business profit. Maybe you also realize that SEO involves technical processes that only the techie SEO professionals could actually do. It could be that those SEO terms like META tags, backlink, keyword, anchor text, HTML, robot.txt, SERP, pagerank, bounce rate, et cetera are just beyond your vocabulary. You can choose to hire a SEO specialist or SEO company, but you can’t just do it because your budget cannot permit you to do so. Well, I understand that hiring a quality SEO could cost you at least $500 a month and even more. Thus, I have listed below 11 tips that you can follow to boost your business presence on the search engines without even thinking of those SEO technicalities.
1. Write highly useful and unique content on your website or blog. SEO, as an Internet marketing strategy, must have a quality output not only for the search engines, but importantly for the search users or users of your information. Since search engines users look for the content, you have to give what they are looking for – quality and useful content. Content which are useful, unique, well-researched, and comprehensive can also encourage other website owners or bloggers to link back to you as their reference, thereby giving your site backlinks even without expecting them.
2. Target your audience. Online or web publishing is different from traditional or printed publishing because the former’s information are crawlable or indexed by search engines. Therefore, when you make a title and description about your article or post in your site, make it more targeted to audience rather than making it poetic or generic. You can also add geographic terms on your title to target people on a specific location. For example, you can use “quality accounting services in the Philippines” instead of just using “quality accounting services” as a title of your page or post.
3. Write high quality guest post for other blogs on your niche. Guest posting is one of the best SEO tactics used by most Internet marketers to get quality backlinks nowadays. If you love to write and share your ideas or insights to other people, you can consider guest posting with other relevant blogs that have high authority and reputation. Guest posting enables you to put your short bio in every post you contribute. This is a great way, not only to earn backlinks, but also to build your own authority as an expert and to reach more audience.
4. Read relevant blogs, learn from them, and leave insightful comments. Reading other quality blogs that are relevant to yours will give you many advantages. This practice will help you gain more knowledge and ideas from other writers or experts, increase backlinks to your site since you can include your website link when commenting, and build new relationship with other bloggers whom you are leaving with engaging comments.
5. Be active and helpful on social media. SEO is not only about search engines, but it is also about social media since search engines are also considering social media influence or signals as factors in determining the authority of a website. Hence, build a presence for your business on different social media places. You can create accounts or pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and other social networking sites, and then place your company website or information on each of them. To make your social presence stronger, don’t just signup and abandon your profiles, but regularly interact with your friends to increase your connections. Remember that the more friends you have, the more people will know about your business.
6. Share your content with your social media connections. Share your quality content to the people whom you think will find them useful and interesting. Don’t just share all of them to all your social networking connections, but share them according to their interest, location, and other qualifications. Avoid spamming since it will only destroy your reputation. You can also place social media buttons on your web pages to make it easier for your visitors to share your content to their friends or social media circles.
7. Join online communities. Just like reading other relevant blogs, joining online communities, groups or forums, and sharing ideas with other members of these groups will also increase your knowledge and grow your network of friends and business connections. This is also a good way to introduce your business on the community and boost your authority. Some forums would also allow you to include your website link in your signature once you have already earned some level of reputation, thus, giving you some extra juice link for your site’s pagerank.
8. Clean and simplify your website. The average load time of a website could also be one of the factors used by search engines to rank a website according to their algorithms. Thus, make your website lighter and clean. You can optimize the size of your images before uploading them to your website. You can also choose a cleaner theme or design for your company website to avoid clutters.
9. Put your business on the map. Add your business information on Google Map and Google Places. With Google Places, you can add your business information like description, address, and even pictures to make them more discoverable on Google searches. You can also claim your business location on Foursquare so that it will also become discoverable by Foursquare users. Furthermore, you can add your business website on different directories on the Internet just like listing your business on traditional yellow pages.
10. Educate people online. You can extend your practice of sharing ideas to people online by creating multi-media materials, such as infographics, presentations, PDF files, documents, and videos – and then sharing these on different websites that allows sharing of those materials. For example, you can share your presentations on SlideShare.net, your documents on Google Docs, your infographics on Facebook, and your videos on Youtube. These will increase your reach and will also increase your site’s backlinks through the credit link you will place on those materials.
11. Do business with excellence and wow your customers. Finally, remember that a great product that wows a customer has the ability to market itself online. If you will consistently do quality business and satisfy your customers, they would voluntarily promote your business online. Facebook users will voluntarily promote your business on their Facebook Timeline; bloggers will freely blog about their great experience with your business, and so on. This will encourage a word-of-mouth marketing that will spread the good news about your business on the Internet.
I hope those tips above will help you implement effective SEO strategies for your business without even getting into the technical part of SEO. If you have any question or some insights to share with us, feel free to leave a comment below.
Victorino Q. Abrugar is a marketing strategist and business consultant from Tacloban City, Philippines. Vic has been in the online marketing industry for more than 7 years, practicing problogging, web development, content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and consulting.
Thanks Sir for the reminders. I consider myself as a good writer but up until now, I’m still learning the nitty gritty of effective social media marketing. Finding my own niche has also been a struggle for me as I have a vague idea of my own expertise. But I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it.
Great tips!
I’ve been having a hard tie with SEO. I’ve tried reading up on it, but a lot of stuff seems complicated. And worse, I keep reading about google’s efforts to cut down the impact of SEO-ing your site. hehe
But I like that your tips are practical and won;t get me into trouble with google. Thanks!
This tips are high recommendable. Basically, it gives idea to people who are interested in SEO but they don’t know what things to do first or what to prioritize.