Search engine marketing (SEM) allow internet marketers and businesses to make their presence known on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. It allows them to drive free traffic to their website for little to no cost whatsoever, depending on their niche market.
To succeed in SEO, website owners must strategically compete with others to gain the best possible exposure which could lead to an increase in revenue or website activities. In some cases, the competition is negligible while in others it can be a little less of an impossible task.
This is often the case when individuals and small businesses with tiny budgets try to take on the big and established businesses with unlimited budgets. In saying so however, we are starting to notice that success with SEO isn’t necessarily reserved for the big corporations with large budgets. In fact, good SEO can be achieved with little to no money down; except it could take slightly longer to reach the desired goal.
In saying that, how can small businesses and individuals benefit from free search engine optimisation and drive good traffic to their websites? The following are some of the most important factors to take into consideration:
Create Excellent Contents
For many years, the phrase “content is king” has been used to describe the importance of content when it comes to SEO and driving free traffic to any site. The fact of the matter is, the phrase still remains true till this day, which means the more you pay attention to your contents and generate enough of them, the more you will benefit from search engine traffics. Contents could be in the form of texts (such as articles and blog posts), videos, audio etc.
Most marketers prefer to focus more on texts contents as they believe it is more effective in driving people to their website. The truth is, they are right as search engines tend to love texts; although they like to see a mixture of everything as well. If adding videos, images or audio, it pays to include a few paragraphs of texts to give the post or page more power on the playing field.
Targeted Keywords
There is no use creating tonnes and tonnes of content with no specific keywords in mind because what happens is you will end up getting traffic that are likely to be of no use to you whatsoever. For example, if your website is about search engine optimisation, your goal should be to focus on creating contents that contain search engine optimisation related keywords and not dog related one. By focusing on your niche keywords, you will succeed with SEO and easily drive good, targeted traffic to your websites.
Website Speed
Google’s search algorithm is getting smarter by the minute and they have now updated it such that it takes all websites’ loading speed into consideration when ranking them in search results. Some of the factors that affect how fast a website loads include: image sizes, CSS files, contents, JavaScript’s server response time, etc. Most good SEO tools allow you to analyze your website and see what things can be changed to update its speed.
Optimising for Local Search
Optimising your website for local search is very important. It allows you to get even more targeted visitors to your site; visitors looking for a business such as yours within their local area will easily find you.
There are a number of ways to do this. One way to do this is via on-page SEO by adding your geographical location to your META title and H1 tags. The other relatively easy way is to register with Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local and they will index your website for your chosen location. It will show up in their search result each time someone looks for a service or business within your local area.
High Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are easier explained using the analogy of referrals. They can be seen as referrals from other websites pointing to yours. The more valuable the referring website is to search engines such as Google, the more powerful their effects will be on your search engine ranking. Obviously, the more quality backlinks you have pointing to your website the better. However, be careful not to overdo it as Google has cracked down on such practices in recent years.
Conclusion
While all these tips are well and good, they must each be done in the best possible way in order to get the most out of them. Of them all, the most important, as far as most marketers are concerned, is good quality content and backlinks. Focus more on these 2 and the sky is your limit with search engine marketing.
