You’ve probably heard of the practices search engine optimization (SEO) entails. Its purpose is to enable a website to be crawled and valued by Google and other search engines. Primarily, this is so a target audience may be able to find said website through commonly used search strings relating to relevant keywords.
SEO is always changing due to the evolution of Google’s algorithms, and the best practices now are not the same SEO practices we used five years ago. Click To Tweet There are things that you need to start doing before your organization grows to the status of needing to outsource SEO work. The only thing you can’t do is ignore it, because this is very possibly the crux of your findability in today’s internet age. Here are some basic SEO tactics and tools for a modern startup company.
Technical SEO and the Basics
The basics encompass two things: your decided direction and your technical SEO. In this case, “decided direction” points to the keywords you want to rank for. First, decide the main keywords you’ll need to rank for. For instance, if you run a furniture company, one of your keywords/key phrases will probably be or include the actual word “furniture.” Then create a list of seed keywords and conduct some research to find all parallel and relevant words and phrases that you may need/want to rank for.
After you decide this, you’ll want to work on technical SEO. Technical SEO has been effectively detailed by sites like Moz.com, but they involve working within your code to make sure Google is crawling your site correctly, as well as optimizing your site for readability by viewers who may see it in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Title tags, H1s and H2s, and meta descriptions are all terms that will start becoming commonplace to you once you start doing your own technical SEO. Once you’ve effectively optimized your site, you’ll be able to start focusing on going out and improving your rankings in the keywords you’ve chosen.
Link Building
Now that you have your keywords figured out, start building some SEO credibility toward those keywords. This involves a process commonly known as “link building” — creating links to your web domain and specific pages from other, hopefully relevant web pages. The idea is that when Google’s algorithm sees your website being linked to from other places around the web, in relation with certain keywords, it’ll start ranking you higher in the SERPs involving those keywords. In general, the evidence put forth by SEO blogs for this seems to corroborate its credibility.
There are two types of link building: external and internal link building. External link building means link building on web domains that are not your own, and internal link building means link building on your own web domain to specific pages. Simple as that.
There are several different ways to do external link building: content creation (often guest blogging), resource link building (as in posts on “resources” and “links” pages), and publicity posts (sometimes referred to as “fresh mentions”). Now, with publicity posts, you may be surprised to find that you’ve already been mentioned on some websites if you’ve done any work. If you search for your name and find a place you’ve been mentioned but not linked to, this could be an awesome press opportunity as well as an SEO opportunity.
Internal link building, in short, comes down to this: if you make a news or blog post on your website, try to at least link to one other page internally in each post. This will help bring SEO attention and ranking to specific pages, not just your domain name. That becomes useful when people are searching for specific services you offer, not just the overall purpose of your company (i.e. kinds of furniture, not just a “furniture company.”). With a strong external and internal linking strategy, your SERP placing is bound to climb higher and higher.
Staying Good at What You Do
Getting your name out is only one part of the equation. Visibility builds name recognition but doesn’t necessarily maximize sales. The content on your site should be useful. Click To Tweet You should treat yourself and make yourself an authority on the industry you operate in. But even that, in itself, may not be enough.
Staying active and innovative is the final frontier to this whole marketing thing. If you’re not doing anything new, you may find yourself blending in with the crowd. Do what you do differently, and do it better. Click To Tweet With that, in addition to staying active in your industry and community, you can go from being a “heard of” company to a household name.
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