It is no secret that search engine optimization, or SEO, plays a great role in the visibility of a site’s online presence. Most users tend to never scroll past the first few results they get after using a search engine, and they almost never make it to the second page. Because of this, companies that offer SEO services are turning up everywhere, claiming to get your website or company exposed to millions of potential costumers or readers. This is a great service if you want to save a lot of time and effort in optimizing your exposure.
If you don’t want to spend money going through an SEO company, you can try to utilize common SEO techniques yourself. Although it will most certainly require some time, research and effort on your part, learning to use SEO services to expose your website can be done. The following will guide you through some common SEO techniques that are used by both SEO firms and hobbyists.
Determine your rank.
The first step in optimizing your page is to determine it’s current ranking. Determine whether the page is indexed on the major search engines by typing either the name of your site or all the relevant keywords of a specific page into the search engine bar. If it is, great! See what it’s ranking is so that you will have something to compare it to later. If it is not indexed, determine why that is. It can be due to various issues, such as slow site speed, repeated content, bad hosting and much more. If you can’t figure out why your site isn’t indexed you can usually contact Google or any other search engine company you are using.
Check your links.
Make sure to check all your links. Are any of them broken, taking you to a dead page? Also make sure that your back links are working. If you can’t remember where you have most of them (hopefully you have enough posted that you can’t), there are online tools that can help determine the number of back links out there.
Know your competition.
What are they doing that you are not, allowing them to rank higher than you? You can also check out their back links and possibly link to them for your own page.
Do a quality control check for your page.
Make sure that your page is working the way you want it to. It should load relatively fast and all internal links should be in working order. Make sure that once someone lands on your page, they want to stay there! Fresh content will also help you rank higher on the search engines, so make sure you take care of updating your site.
Finally, optimize your page through alternate online mediums.
These can include pretty much anything from back linking through social media or blog comments to submitting and publishing articles or doing a guest post on a blog. Again it is important to make sure to create quality content. Simply spamming multiple sites with back links will do nothing except get you reported as a spammer and give your site a bad reputation.
SEO can be a science of it’s own but it can be done and is by far the most efficient way to obtain a high ranking page, whether you choose to do it yourself or use an experienced SEO company.