Why it's important to make your website and business SEO friendly
Mastering SEO is just as important as hiring the right people for your marketing team. It generates leads, brings new visitors to your website and makes a website or company blog post show up in search engine results. In our last post, we discussed in a blog post why SEO is important and what it means for your business. Today, we’re digging deeper and explaining how to make your business and company website SEO friendly.
First, it’s important to make sure you’re churning out quality content on a regular basis. There are few things as discouraging as a website where it looks like the lights are on, but with no one at home. If a blog hasn't been updated for months, that's a good sign that either the company has gone under or that they are too busy to keep their content updated. Update company news and blogs regularly to show people that you're business is alive and well. In addition, make sure you’re writing to your target audience in your brand’s unique voice and tone. Write the way people like to talk— be human, relevant and creative, and avoid using industry jargon.
The next thing to focus on to make your website SEO friendly is to take advantage of keywords. Google scans web pages for certain words, specifically the type of words people use to search for a given business. Identify the types of words your target audience and customers would use to find you. These initial words are your seed keywords and the best for including in headlines, title tags and body content. To ensure that your website shows up more prominently in search, include these keywords in various pages of your website. Long-tail keywords are longer keywords or phrases that may be searched less frequently, but have less competition when it comes to search. Finally, keyword phrases are terms people are using more generally, and are ideal to include in the body of your content. With all keywords, however, use them intelligently: don’t throw them in every other sentence and try to trick Google; be strategic where you place them on your website and Google will find and use them accordingly.
With your keywords determined, focus on title tags and meta descriptions. A title tag is what tells Google what your website is about and it’s the most important place for your keywords to appear. Keep it simple and to the point because it’s a big factor for your website ranking. A meta description is directly below a title tag on a search page. However, the meta description is for the viewer rather than Google. It’s a quick bio of your business and while you could certainly write anything you want for a meta description, there are a few basic suggestions: keep it 155 characters or less, include as many keywords as you can without sounding robotic and include a call-to-action, or CTA, to incline visitors to click on your website. The example below is what appeared when we searched “Visit Greece” in Google.
The title tag is the top bold line, “Visit Greece, The Official website of the Greek Tourism Organisation.” The simple website link and CTA included in the meta description are what pushed this example to the top in a Google search.
In addition to relevant and fresh content, it’s important to have a healthy dose of links sprinkled throughout your website. For Google, finding a website which has various other sites linking back to the original website provides reliability and a sense of trust and value. Websites that link to an outside page are called backlinks. Find websites that cover relevant topics and form a relationship. Guest blogging, sharing infographics or even e-mailing with these sites and sharing relevant links from your page are all great ways to get started. Remember, healthy social interaction is just an important on the internet as it is in real life.
SEO is an important part of content marketing, and implementing proper techniques of SEO isn’t something that happens overnight. Start at the beginning, by making sure your website is in working order with no broken links or pixelated images. Write fresh content on a regular basis and share that on social media. Then, begin to work on meta descriptions, title tags and headlines. As you build your website and your brand, it will become easier to reach out to key influencers and find proper backlinks. While it may seem overwhelming at first, all of these small parts work together to make your website, and your business, SEO friendly.
Need help figuring out where to start? Let's Yak.
About Yakkety Yak:
Yakkety Yak is a full-service content marketing company that produces custom written content for businesses, including blogs, website copy, case studies, newsletters, social media marketing, public relations and more. We want to be an extension of your marketing team to help you connect to end users and decision influencers, based on the principle of one common voice, for one target audience. Yakkety Yak helps you find the words you were looking for —so let’s YAK.