Most businesses with a web presence don’t make much money online. Instead, they make their money through word of mouth or print or television advertising. Many businesses don’t spend the time and effort on Search Engine Optimization. There are many reasons for that. One reason is that they don’t have the time and money to spend on SEO work. The second reason, in many cases, is that they only paid a search engine optimization company to get little or no results.
I’m just going to teach you some of the steps to a successful search engine optimization strategy. Always remember that organic SEO takes time. Google can rank you in a week for an easy key phrase or many months for a more difficult keyword, but once you rank #1, things should be smooth sailing and all you have to worry about is holding your position.
Ok, so where exactly do you start? Suppose you own a car wash business in Houston, Texas. Some SEO companies will target the keyword “car wash”. This is the wrong way to do keyword research because the term is too broad. Even if you somehow ranked on page one with the term “car wash,” you’re still competing with 49 other states searching for that term. As soon as they click on your website and see that you are in Houston, they will click away. Regardless, the term is so contested that you may never rank for that key phrase.
Instead, you would benefit from trying to rank for a local key phrase. An example would be “Houston Car Wash”. Keyword research should take up the bulk of your time when it comes to SEO. Research the competition and see what they’re doing. Check who is linking to their websites and see if you can request that those websites link back to you. The reason you want websites to link back to you is because Google also considers backlinks to determine how important your website is. Every link to your website counts as a score in the eyes of Google, especially backlinks from reputable websites.
One of the most important things to work on is your actual page content. Try to use text and not images for your navigation. Also try not to use too much javascript. While your site should look nice, also try to keep your source code as clean as possible. For this reason, I recommend Tables CSS. Tables CSS is much cleaner than if you built your website with tables. The most important thing about optimizing your website is to have lots of relevant content and to update your website from time to time, maybe once a month or once every few months.
There are many other factors that will help you rank higher on Google. These are just some of the most important and fundamental factors. Once you master these, you can continue researching and evolving.
