Your website is the only 24/7/365 employee.
I mean, sometimes, we as entrepreneurs have to sleep, so when we finally lie down and rest our eyes, we are guaranteed that our website keeps working to bring in new organic traffic or free traffic. How? Through your SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
Having an optimized site helps search engines rank your website and get it in front of your ideal audience. To learn more about how SEO really works, feel free to check out my SEO decoded post here. Now, the only way to help your website rank in the search engines is to make sure it gets optimized for your intended audience. Every blog post, every page, product, and podcast episode you publish should be optimized for your intended purpose.
Yes, some things may overlap, but it may also help serve another one of your avatars. Most people try and discount SEO because they don’t appear to comprehend how it really works, thus underestimating how it can make a major difference to the brand. Since your website can not bring in organic traffic if not optimized, here are the 5 major things to start with to help build your organic traffic.
PAGE TITLES
Page titles may seem pretty obvious, but how they should be optimized doesn’t seem so. The basic practice is to add your intended keyword or keyword phrase into your page title. Keep readability in mind when crafting your titles; remember you are writing for your audience as well as the search engines. Your page title should have less than 60 characters. You have to capture your visitors with this limited number of characters, so make it click-worthy all the time.
Your title should also immediately identify what the page actually has on it, so that the intended audience views it and, in turn, helps your bounce rate. If your visitors click on your page expecting to see your Shop, but it shows irrelevant information, then they will probably leave almost as soon as they landed on it, causing an unwanted high bounce rate.
PAGE DESCRIPTIONS
After working on your page titles, the next thing to optimize is your page descriptions which grant you the opportunity to craft an attention-grabbing description to help visitors click. Think about when you are searching on Google, and a number of results pop up. When the description underneath a result doesn’t match what you’re looking for or, worse, says “No page content”, you automatically skip over it because it doesn’t look “real”.
Keep this visitor’s perspective in mind when crafting descriptions on your website and add information from your blog into the description.
PAGE CONTENT
Of course, we won’t miss the page content–one of the most important elements to optimize on your website as it’s the meat of the actual search. Your visitors are traveling on the search engines, then select your business, and finally, the page loads to your content.
Will they stay or will they go?
We definitely aim for them to “stay”! Another essential for your visitors is an engaging and informative place for them to land on. For instance, if it’s your “About” page, some good visuals are significant while for your blog, resources may be a good supplement.
Simply put, make it engaging. Make sure your visitors learn a thing or two or connect with you in some way before they leave. The longer they stay on your website, the better it is for your analytics and SEO. It kind of informs the search engines that your site is the “Go to place for (insert industry or interest)”, not a dumping ground for a bunch of text. The job of your site as your 24/7/365-working employee is to go and bring in subscribers, readers, and customers. Let them have something worthwhile to view when they get there.
WEBSITE PHOTOS
Often neglected, your website photos are also crucial in the optimization process. Your photos are also searchable. The photo name, file name, and photo description may all include your keyword, keyword phrases, and your blog/ business name.
Adding optimization strategically with your logo, favicon, blog images, headshots, blog header photos, and Pinterest pins makes your image searchable in the search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo to bring in organic traffic to your site.
SOCIAL SHARE INFO
Lastly, when your website is shared on social media and in messages, you always see a link with a photo this is your social share information. This is added for site-wide information which shows up when any page on your site is shared. It includes a photo, description, and page title. If you have a blog or would like a certain photo to show up, you will need to configure it in the SEO settings of the post.
Optimizing your social share info helps your visitors know what they can expect on that particular page.
That’s it I hope it’s much clearer now. Also, don’t forget to download your cheat sheet to have with you when you are having a good time going through your website and optimizing your blogs!
