These things get repeated over and over again but we can’t reinvent the wheel. Every little thing that you do can make a huge difference at the end. The secret with SEO is that there is no secret!! There is no sure way of marketing your website and what could bring great success to one company or website could do nothing for another. That’s what is so frustrating with SEO: not only the marketing tactics change constantly but there are so many possibilities and to get the perfect “mix” of ingredients to make it work depends on the time and effort you (or someone you hire for this job) will put into it.

It’s a little bit like cooking. You know what you want to create but you never know what is going to happen before you mix all the ingredients together and you let it cook and do its magic.

The first step starts with your website. If it has not been built with the following items in mind, you should go through your website and modify or add these things all throughout and should be implemented for each page separately (do not put the same keywords, titles or content on every page). Each page should focus on a different thing or subject.

The title tag and the META tags for description and keywords should all include the most important keywords and search phrases that people would search for, for your kind of business, and each page targeting a specific product or service that you offer. If you want to target a specific geographical area, don’t forget to include all the names and terms related to that area.

For the title tag, keep it short but straight to the point

For the description tag, be specific on what you offer. This description is what people see when doing a search in Google or any other search engine so make it appealing while using as many important keywords as possible.

For the keyword tag, write all the specific keywords related to that page only. Each page should have a single core term associated with it. You can add variations of that core term in the keyword tag and all throughout the page. Another great way to target your audience is to use the terminology that is specific for your area of business or expertise that people would recognize.

It is always good to ask yourself: “What are my target customers searching for, what questions are they asking, what would attract them to my business?” and so on. The more questions you can answer, the most targeted keywords you will find. Then decide on which page the keywords should be, then add all specific keywords you found all throughout these pages

It is also a good idea to add heading tags (H1) for paragraphs and titles and strong and bold tags on the keyword phrases consistently throughout the text. Google gives some importance to these tags as relevant content in your pages, so use it wisely. Your pages must contain fresh content and enough of it (you should have a minimum of 400 to 450 words per page). Google bases its rankings on how interesting and unique your content is so spend a little more time to write something that comes from you and not something you copied from another website (it is illegal anyway, it is a copyright infringement, unless you get the approval of the original writer. This could actually get your website banned if the search engine thinks that you are just a copy of an existing website (duplication websites are not good). When you add links, include the http:// before the domain name and make sure that all links are working (or your rankings could suffer from it).

Images can now bring a lot of traffic to your website since search engines started providing image searches. If you use the following tricks for every image on your website, you could increase your traffic dramatically:
When you name your images, make sure you only use keywords and be as detailed as possible

Example:
not good: 12345.jpg
great: black-and-white-shitzu.jpg

If somebody searches for a black and white shitzu, there is a good chance that your image will show up in the search and if they click on the image it brings them to your website.
Then use the ALT attributes to add keywords to that image (ex: My black and white shitzu)

There is also other content you can add to your pages (like videos, maps, etc) that you can add keywords or specifications to. Don’t forget to use all the opportunities that you have to add keywords and content to your pages to attract more traffic to your website. The golden rule here is to have a variety of very targeted words and phrases for each page (do not use the same keyword a million time or it will not work!) If you overdo it, it could do the opposite result and actually affect your rankings. It is also not a good idea to try to cheat by using “farm pages”, shortcuts or spam optimization as it could get your website banned for good.
Other great ways that can bring you some results is to add a sitemap that you will submit to the search engines, and install a web analytics program (like Google Analytics) to monitor traffic and see what is really going on between your website and your visitors. This can really help you with your SEO, as it shows what keywords people used, what pages they visited, how long they were on each page and an unlimited amount of great information you can use to better your SEO tactics.

If you see that one page doesn’t get visited or if people don’t stay on it for more than 5-10 seconds, you would know that you should definitely modify its content or completely remove it. If it doesn’t bring any positive result, it shouldn’t be there.

Then make sure that you update your content and that you have something attractive that will make people want to come back to your website.

Next post, I will go a little deeper into SEO.