By Erin Robinson
From reading Organic SEO, Why It Affects You, you learned about how Organic SEO works and why it is important for your website. Now the time has come to increase your Organic SEO ranking. Let’s dive in.
Use Google AdWords (or similar programs for other search engines): This is a free tool that can look up the keywords you want to rank under in your industry. It will tell you how many people have searched for that particular word in the past month and how competitive the word is. If the word is 100% competitive, you may want to reconsider your strategy and go for words that are less competitive and more attainable.
Constantly update your content and keywords: It is not enough to have great content or relevant keywords on your website when you first set it up. You need to keep your content fresh and continually work the keywords into different areas of the site. When you update your site continually with relevant content, it helps the search engines to notice your site. This is why blogs or new feeds are so great. It will benefit you to create a list of keywords ahead of time. However, do not work them into your site in a manner that is unnatural. If you plant them irrelevantly throughout your site, this will work against you. The search engines can tell.
Get Links to point to your website: The more websites that have links to your site, the more relevant your site looks to search engines. You can use directories, social media sites, strategic partners (if they’re willing to link to you). The more significant to your industry, the better. What doesn’t work is offering to place a link on your site in exchange for someone to link to yours (reciprocal link). The search engines can see through this and it can work against you especially if the reciprocal links are unnatural (completely different industries, or have nothing to do with each other).
Be as specific as possible: When using keywords and phrases, you do not want to use general terms. For example, if you run a cookie business you do not want to use a broad term such as cookies. It will be a lot harder to rank over a highly competitive broad word. Use words like chocolate chip cookies or gluten free cookies. Make your key words specific and this will help you rank.
Have an SEO savvy designer to work on your website: When building a new site, be sure that your web designer knows what backend items to build into your site to help with Organic SEO. Some of these items include Title tags, Meta tags, Meta descriptions. They should know where to plug your keywords into the backend of your site. If not, that’s a red flag.
Add Google/Yahoo Maps on your content page: You can submit your address to the different search engines and that will help your rank as far as where your business is located. If someone is searching in your area, you will be ranked higher.
As a final note, we caution that these are in no way fool proof strategies to get higher rankings on search engines. Building Organic SEO takes time, hard work and patience. There is a lot more involved then the little bit that we have shared. There are several companies that specialize in Organic Search Engine Optimization… you may want to hire one. Also know that the Google and Microsoft are very smart… and always changing the rules. They do this to ensure that relevance is king and spammers and other unethical web folks can’t cheat the system.
Happy ranking!