5 Surprising Things You Didn’t Know About SEO
Everyone is worried about SEO, but few people really know how to improve their website rankings. The good news is that there are lots of things you can do quite easily, without first obtaining a degree in marketing.
1. Look at Your H1 Headings
Every webpage has an H1 heading. That’s always the most important heading on that page, and it’s where you need to insert your best keyword. For example, if you’re selling financial services, then that specific term needs to be included in your H1 heading.
2. Revise Your Meta Description
Every page has a meta description. This description should be shorter than 160 characters; otherwise, it will get truncated by search engines. The meta description needs to include your keyword as well as a call to action or CTA. Examples of CTAs are “Call us for more information!” or “Read the full article to learn more!” or “Sign up for our newsletter!”.
3. How Are Visitors Finding You?
Before you spend a lot of time on optimizing your content and your website, you must know how visitors are finding you on the internet. Even if you sell a variety of financial services, most people who come to your site might be looking for retirement advice. In that case, it makes sense to optimize your site for the keywords “retirement advice”.
4. You Need Inbound Links
Even though plenty of link farms have been busted, you still need incoming links to boost your search engine rankings. Search engines assess your website’s importance partially on the importance of other sites linking back to yours. Obviously, you want high-ranking sites to link to your site. And for that, you need great content.
5. You Still Need Great Content
Content is king. Nowadays, you can get cheap content, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to great quality. In fact, your website visitors will leave your site quickly if it’s full of fluff and doesn’t offer any real information. Good content also helps encourage those inbound links. After all, if you have a great article on a topic of your expertise, other websites are more likely to link to it.
In conclusion, SEO is not magic, and therefore, you can make a difference for your site ranking. Start out by researching your website statistics to determine your important keywords, then create your content, headings and meta descriptions based on that. After that you can start working on getting some high-quality sites to link back to yours.
