Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) has a reputation as being a bit of a dark art. But we need to learn this area to market online efficiently. It’s through SEO and SMM (Social Media Marketing) that we’re able to drive traffic through to any website these days.
Here are six very basic steps to get your A-game in SEO. It certainly isn’t comprehensive and it’s ever-changing.
Understand the business
We can’t help market a product or service we don’t understand, so our first step is always to research the industry and gain a better understanding. We’ll look at competitors and their marketing methods, analyse the existing website and research any news or trending topics.
Audit the site
We’ll run through the site carefully, looking for all issues that may affect its ability to rank properly. We’ll review the content too, checking that it’s written well and structured correctly. We then mend any problems we encounter.
Check the keywords
Now we need to decide with the client what keywords we want to target. What do we want to rank for? This isn’t as easy as plucking out the most apparent. We usually start with keywords that define the business, and we then use various tools to generate keyword ideas. We look at the competition and search volumes of our ideas, and look for possibilities.
Get your pen and paper out…
So now we need to start thinking about creating content. From our keywords, we can generate topic ideas. We can combine these ideas with different types of content – for example, videos, blog articles, pictures, infographics, to do’s, tutorials etc
Start publishing and promoting
Once we have created our content and optimised it for a keyword, we publish it and then spread the content around social media. As the content gets picked up on social networks, so Google starts receiving social signals to the relevance of our content.
And finally
Write, Promote, boast and Repeat.
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