Getting traffic from search engines isn’t a traffic strategy that you deploy in one day. However, once you build up your search engine optimization strategy, it is something from which you can reap the benefits for many months (often years) to come. That’s why you’ll want to check out this crash course to raise your visibility in Google and other search engines…
Step 1: Select Your Keywords
The first thing you need to do is figure out what sorts of words your market is typing into the search engines. You can do this by using a keyword tool, I find KWFinder easy to use, but there's also Google Autocomplete and sites like AnswerThePublic.
Look for the low-hanging fruit. These are the longtail keywords that may not have a huge number of searches (perhaps less than a thousand a month), but they also don’t have a lot of competition.
Step 2: Sprinkle Keywords Into Your Content
The next step is to include these keywords on your website and in your content.
The key here is to do this NATURALLY. If you wouldn’t ordinarily use a keyword in a piece of content, then don’t try to force it awkwardly into content now. Google is looking for high-quality content. As such, write for your human readers (and let optimizing for the search engines naturally follow, but don’t force it).
You can sprinkle your keywords into the following places (if you can do it naturally):
- Page titles.
- Article titles.
- Into the content (include only once or at most twice per 100 words of content).
- In your navigation.
- In anchor text for internal links.
- Meta descriptions (which are the descriptions you provide for search engines via your SEO plugin)
Note: If you’re blogging using WordPress, you can use an SEO plugin such as RankMath to help optimize your site for the search engines.
Next…
Step 3: Secure Links Naturally
Google and other search engines view a link from another high-quality site to your site as a “vote” that you too have a high-quality site. That’s why you’ll want to naturally collect links from authority sites in your niche.
The key once again is the word “naturally.” Don’t buy links or do link exchanges. Instead, focus on quality or quantity. You can collect these links naturally by guest blogging, distributing press releases, and creating unique content that a lot of high-quality sites will naturally want to link to.
And finally…
Step 4: Stay Informed
The search engine optimization landscape seems to be constantly changing, which is why you’ll want to stay on top of these changes. You can stay informed by following SEO authority sites such as:
Above all, stay away from spammy tactics or anything that tries to “trick” the search engines. As always, create a high-quality, mobile-responsive, and user-friendly site for human beings, and the search engines will naturally like it too.
Search engine optimization takes time to do right, but the resulting traffic is well worth the effort.
That’s why you’ll want to use the above steps to start raising your visibility in search engines.