Search engines are the primary driver of traffic for the majority of the Internet. While social media can be a great place to get traffic, users in many markets are beginning to become desensitized to certain types of posts that would normally get a lot of likes and shares. Many companies spend months trying to gain a following on social media without making any significant progress. In reality, that requires quite a bit of ongoing work to manage it effectively. On the other hand, optimizing your site to get it to rank highly in search engines is also quite complicated. One of the best reasons to focus on search traffic rather than social media is that once you have optimized your site, the ongoing maintenance required to keep it ranked highly is much less time consuming.
Unfortunately, SEO scares a lot of businesses off because of its complexity. While it is true that there are a lot of factors involved in the algorithms of the major search engines, there are a few things you can do right away that are known to have significant weight when it comes to ranking a website. It is surprising how many websites are missing out on traffic due to the fact that they are not aware of these tricks.
Use Google Plus
Google Plus is heavily linked to search engine ranking, and in that way it is different from the other social networks out there. While it is true that Google is dissolving Google Plus, they are breaking up the various pieces of it into different products. While we do not know exactly what is going to happen to your posts on Google’s social network, it is likely that this is going to continue to be very useful.
Use YouTube
YouTube, like Google Plus, is owned and operated by Google, and it is also heavily linked to Google’s own search engine results. In many cases, a search on Google will rank relevant YouTube videos even higher than relevant blog posts. While video can be scary if you are not an expert, it should be comforting to know that most YouTube videos do not have high production values. You really do not need all that much in order to get brand recognition and traffic sourced from YouTube. You should also know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world. Industry experts estimate that video content will overtake written content in the next few years. It is important to get a head start on this while you still can.
Use Google Maps
If you have a business with a storefront that can sell products or services to local customers, you absolutely need to be on Google Maps. When you create your Google Plus page, you will have the opportunity to add details such as your address, phone number, hours, and information about your services. Soon after you do this, Google will list your local business on their open source maps, which are used by hundreds of millions of consumers to find local businesses. Few people think of maps as being a search engine, and that is why this often gets overlooked in a company’s overall SEO strategy.
Learn a Little HTML
You really do not need to know much of this universal coding language to have a huge impact on your search engine rank. One of the most crucial SEO tips is to ensure that your primary keywords are seen by Google using a heading tag. Essentially, when a particular string of text is seen as a heading, it gets additional weight in search engine ranking for that page. Place your primary keywords in the appropriate HTML heading tags to help the search engines understand what that page is about.
Use Internal Links
While many companies will spend a lot of time trying to get backlinks from external sites, it is also important to have a great internal linking structure. Wikipedia is one of the highest ranked websites in the world, and that is no accident. Regardless of the Wikipedia page you find yourself on, there will be dozens of links to other related web pages within their site. This makes it easier for visitors to get around their site, and in turn, this causes visitors to spend more time on their site. All of this leads to behaviours that lead to higher search engine rankings. Wherever possible, you should be linking between relevant pages on your site. This may mean that you need to spend some time adding extra paragraphs to existing articles, but it will be worth it in the end.
Hire an SEO Agency
If your company has a marketing budget, it might not be a bad idea to hire an SEO agency in Dubai. SEO agencies will always be able to accomplish more than what you can do on your own. SEO is certainly complex, but the biggest hurdle is not necessarily about learning the major ranking factors. The problem is actually in the execution of strategies that take into account these factors. Generating high-quality backlinks, for example, is time-consuming, tedious, and would require you to set aside a lot of valuable time. Hiring an SEO agency to handle this for you may be a better strategy.
Create Buzz-worthy Content
How many times a day do you suppose content on the Internet goes viral? It is happening all the time, and if you spend any time on social media, you see the end result in your various streams. While it is true that some undeserving articles and videos make their way to internet superstardom that is completely unpredictable. However, you can still use viral marketing in your SEO strategy if you decide early on not to let it be a matter of chance. There are many types of content that go viral, and you can focus on aspects that make sense for your business.
If you are in a service business, for example, you could create a detailed and genuinely helpful e-book for consumers in your market. If that piece of content is worthy of getting attention in the industry, it is very possible that it will. It may not go viral, but there is a good chance that it will be noticed and shared by people in your market. This can help you generate backlinks, build on your brand recognition, and be seen as a leader in the industry.
