So, you’ve got this amazing new or revamped website, you’ve spent a lot of time and done a lot of work to get it going, and you haven’t seen the immediate uproar you’ve been waiting for from the new company. What went wrong?

The attractive, aesthetic website is merely the first step in a marketing plan. As part of your overall marketing strategy, it is the combination of different tactics that will genuinely yield the results you want.

Imagine building a lemonade stand at your backyard. You’ve got the best lemonade, a great shop, and a fantastic sales force. But, if you don’t let the world know about your offerings, your potential customers just drive right through without knowing You’ve got the world’s best Lemonade in your backyard.

Your website is more like that hidden lemonade stand. It’s your job to set up online road signs and send newsletters or direct mails to promote your website unless people won’t know it is there. Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer’s persona and ask how you’d find, or even know how to search for, your website.

Let’s take a look at the basic things you can do to start your new website.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing quality and relevant customers to your website through organic search engine results.

What is Organic and Paid Search Results?

Organic search results are the unpaid results which appear on the first page of google search results page. In the example below, the unpaid results are all a part of that organic search when I typed “buy mobiles online" in Google.

SEO is a digital marketing strategy which focuses on your website’s presence in search results on search engines like Google, Bing etc., When you master this strategy you can use different tactics to increase web traffic to your website

On the other hand, search engines might also show paid search results, which are known as display ads or pay-per-click ads. These are denoted with the word “Ad" before the hyperlink, as shown in the example below.

What are the types of SEO?

There are three types of SEO you should work on to drive traffic to your website.

  • On-Page SEO
  • Off-Page SEO
  • Technical SEO

What is On-Page SEO?

Everything you do on your web page to increase your web traffic is On-page SEO and also known as On-site SEO. On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing your web content for users and search engines which includes optimizing titles, URL, internal links and adding alt tag to images.

Search engines are much smarter in 2020 than they were in the past but they still use some old school technics. For example, looking for specific keywords on your website.

Given that

On-page SEO is something more than stuffing keywords in your content. You need to optimize your web page for your targeted users rather than for search engines. You also need to optimize your content for the following things,

  • User Experience
  • Bounce Rate
  • Search Intent
  • Page Loading Speed
  • Click Through Rate

How to do On-Page SEO?

Here, I have explained the bare minimum on-page optimization as simple as I can. you should put each one of these on your website’s main pages

Title Tag

Title tag tells both the real people and search engine what the page is about. Title should not exceed 70 characters. Try to include your business or brand name and keywords related to that specific web page in title.

Meta Description

Long story short, it’s the reason why a user might decide to click or not click on your page in the Search engine results page.

It goes without saying, it’s worth making it count.

Bear both Desktop and mobile while writing Meta description, because the length of the description displayed depends on the device. A meta description is usually shortened on mobile.

Adding your business name or brand name and related keywords in Meta description will help you stand out to the user

Internal Links

Internal links refer to the links that send users from one page to another page on the same website. Internal links are important because it improves the time on site, boosts page rank and page views etc. It helps google bots to crawl and index

Header Tags

Header tag helps both users and search engines to distinguish between different sections. There must be only one tag on a page. Wrap your subheadings around and there can be several occurrences of both.

Image Name & Alt Tags

You should think of a relative keywords for both the title of an image and alt tag. Applying images to alt tags such as product photos can positively impact an ecommerce store’s search engine rankings.

Content

You might already have heard about content marketing and content development. The more repeated users visiting your website is directly propotional to the quality of your content. The key to keep your audience engaged on your website is to have Quality content. You can include, but not limited, the following things to create a quality content.

  • Blog Posts
  • Articles
  • Infographics
  • Videos

You can simply begin to write blog posts on your website, as your audiences increase you can expand your content inventory to additional types of media.

Off-Site Optimisation

A web site that is high quality and useful is more likely to have references (backlinks) from other websites.

What are Backlinks?

Well, backlinks are links from one website to a page on another website. Google and other major search engines consider back-links “votes” for a specific page. Pages with a high number of back-links tend to have high organic search engine rankings.

How to get Backlinks?

Quality backlinks are hard to get. Here I have mentioned few smart ways to earn backlinks.

The broken-link building method

The links that are pointing to a particular page becomes invalidated once the page goes down. They become broken links not every webmaster is aware of it. But you can get the job done for them.

First, you have to look for sites that might have broken links. There are tools to find broken links in a web site like Xenu and screaming frog.

The best way to fix the broken links is to create similar content on your web page.

Let the webmaster know that you’ve ‘encountered’ a broken link in his/her website and you would like him/her to check it out – and suggest a replacement.

The advantage of guest articles

In SEO, Guest Posting is a method using which you write an article for a website and get a link to your website/blog in return.

It is a win-win situation for both parties. You get a link from the website, while the website owner gets content for his/her site.

However, it has many more advantages and is not limited to just link building.

Say, you guest posted on a popular blog having a lot of email subscribers and social following.

If your post is good enough, it will make you popular among the audience of that blog. Not only that, but you will also get the opportunity to interact with them through blog comments. Also, guest posting links act as a source of referral traffic.

If properly done, it will increase your social following and authority.

Competitors Analysis

Knowing how to analyse your SEO competition is an important step in determining your overall keyword and SEO strategy.

Your competitors are a goldmine of information that can inform every aspect of your SEO strategy and help to skyrocket your website’s organic traffic.

There are tools to do competitor analysis like Ahref and ubersuggest etc.

The following things will help you understand the steps you need to take in order to deploy a comprehensive analysis.

  • Identify your main competitors. (Do not trust your instincts analyse you competitors using manual tools like, Ahref and ubersuggest) Perform key word research.
  • Find broken pages of your competitors.
  • Study traffic breakdown by country.
  • Find competitors’ most popular content.
  • Find competitors’ most popular content.
  • Find competitors’ most linked content.
  • Everything above is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to competitive analysis for SEO.

My advice? Run through the process above, then use competitive analysis tools to delve deeper into any areas of interest.

Contact Important Bloggers & Influencer

Blogger outreach is more than just copying a template and sending it to hundreds of influential bloggers. You’ll have little success this way and a lot of frustration along with it.

Your first task is to find influential bloggers and blogs that you’ll want your business to appear.

How to find them?? Use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social media platform for professionals. If there’s an influential blogger in your industry, they’re probably on LinkedIn.

Twitter. This is a platform where people post their content and interact with their followers. Many influential bloggers use this platform to interact with fellow influential bloggers and tweet their ideas.

You can also use google search.

The next step is, Gain their attention. Interact with them in the comment section. Comments are one of the effective ways of building trust with bloggers. In a way, you’re making their posts more valuable as people see comments as an important sign of engagement. An influential blogger will notice you when you drop comments on their posts.

Send an outreach email. It’s a reality that you might not get a reply to your outreach email straightaway. Even if you’ve carried out all the previous steps correctly.

Follow up if there’s no reply. In most cases, you’ll get a reply in your follow-up.

They may be uninterested in your idea if you get no reply from them after a couple of follow up emails

Getting featured on influential blogs can bring big benefits to your business. You can reach a new and bigger audience and gain more customers. To ensure a better outreach, you have to do a lot of research and get to know an influencer before making your requests. Likewise, you should help to share the post after it’s published.

Social Media

Social media is one of the best ways to grow your businesses and engage with your target audiences.

For starters, social media can help you build brand recognition, foster a community around your business, and grow your
bottom line.

So how can you use social media to get the most out of it? Below I’ll share a few basic simple and effective tips to help you do just that!

You might assume the only options you have are the giants like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. These are some basic options (and essential!) for any type of business, but there are other options worth looking into as well. For example:

  • Pinterest – to share visual content, like images and info-graphics from your blog.
  • Reddit – to prove your knowledge in an industry, and engage with a dedicated community.
  • Tumblr – to create a multimedia diary to support your main website.
  • Google+ – to share content on Google’s own platform (and boost SEO!).
  • Snap chat – to document behind-the-scenes of your business through video.

How to Drive Website Traffic through Social Media?

  • Fill in your profile
  • Promote your blog content
  • Make your content easy to share
  • Post when your audience is active
  • Focus on sharing visual content
  • Engage with your audience (consistently)
  • Optimize your calls-to-action
  • Test paid social advertising

Now that you’re armed with these social media tips, implement them into your social media strategy and watch the traffic flow through to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO just refers to any SEO work that is done aside from the content. Essentially, it’s laying a strong foundation to give your content the best chance it can have to rank for relevant keywords and phrases.

What is Technical SEO?

This aspect of SEO is focused on how well search engine spiders can crawl your site and index your content

Why is Technical SEO Important?

You might have a beautiful website and solid content. But, if your technical SEO is weak? Then you are not going to rank. At the most basic level, Google and other search engines need to be able to find, crawl, render, and index the pages on your website.

How can you Improve Your Technical SEO?

Use Organised Structure

Your site structure is how all of the pages on your website are organized. In general, you want a structure that’s “flat”. In other words: your site’s pages should all be only a few links away from one another.

URL Structure

There’s no need to overthink your URL structure. Especially if you run a small site (like a blog).

That said: you do want your URLs to follow a consistent, logical structure. This actually helps users understand “where” they are on your site.

Use XML Sitemap

You want Google to crawl every important page of your website. But sometimes, pages end up without any internal links pointing to them, making them hard to find. An XML sitemap lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all, also helping it understand your website structure:

Duplicate & Thin Content

Use an SEO audit tool and remove duplicate and thin content from your website

Page Speed

I’m sure you’ve read about these approaches a thousand times before. But I don’t see nearly as many people talk about a page speed factor that’s just as important.

Conclusion

That’s all. Hopefully, you have gained a good understanding of the basics of SEO. Search engine optimization is not only a recommendation for modern business, but it has become a necessity if you want to run a successful online business. Over 3 billion people use the internet, and this number grows each year and if you want to reach them, one of the best ways to do so is to optimize your website in order to maximize the chances of people finding you.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *