Did you know that 83% of online users use search engines to find what they need? Although many people over the past decade have declared that “SEO is dead,” what we know about search engines and how consumers use them would tell us otherwise.
As the internet currently stands, PPC will never be a complete substitute for search engine optimization; about 75% of users consistently ignored sponsored ads, instead focusing on organic search results. Are you curious about SEO basics for your business? Here are three things you should keep in mind.
1. Original Content is Your Friend
There’s no real substitute for time and effort, and this holds true for SEO techniques. The most consistently successful ways to raise your Google ranking involve more than just a few quick clicks. Adding a blog to your site and consistently updating it, for example, will earn you 432% more pages for search indexing. Switching out generic product descriptions copy/pasted from your manufacturer and adding in original text will also improve your site in the eyes of Google. Highly repetitive text is seen as “less relevant” and it is consequently less likely to show up high in result rankings.
2. There are Many SEO Tools Available for Free
Many of the tools an expert SEO company would use to evaluate your site are already readily available, and most people simply fail to make use of these resources. Google Analytics, for example, can tell you everything from what searches brought people to your site, to who comprises your general demographic. For services like keyword density analyzers, multiple free online options can be found with just a few clicks. Being able to understand your website in this way will help you market it more efficiently.
3. SEO Articles are a Good Entry to Understanding Modern SEO
Did you know that Google just punished popular lyrics site Rap Genius for shady SEO practices? Google did what every company fears will happen to their website: they prevented Rap Genius from coming up in search results, instantly wiping out approximately 80% of their traffic. Rap Genius could probably have avoided this disaster by staying up to date on what is and isn’t considered kosher by Google. Many SEO articles point out how and why their link spamming tactics were doomed to fail.
What SEO basics do you think business owners should know? Helpful info also found here.