Your competitors are smart. In fact, in terms of business, think of competitors as savage, hungry wolves that haven’t had a meal for a while and they are looking at your customer as lunch.
You can be sure the best of your competitors know plenty about search engine optimization, if for no other reason than they paid a local SEO agency to ensure they get the best out of your website.
But if you don’t have the resources to afford an SEO agency at $100 to $150 per hour, then be sure to start with these 10 tips. After all, your competitors did.
- Make sure your website is blazing fast to load.
And there are several elements to this. The first is to get rid of anything unnecessary. The second is to find the right hosting company and the right plan. If you pay only $4 a month for hosting but you share your hosting on a server with several other companies, you are being foolish. Pay more, but get a blazing fast hosting company.
Finally, minimize and compress everything. Compress both text and images. Minimize the coding into machine language. Institute caching, and use excerpts for text with a link rather than the entire article.
SEO guru Neil Patel says that 40 percent will abandon your site if it doesn’t load up in two seconds, and 80 percent will never come back.
- Have reputable backlinks
You don’t want backlinks from Bob’s Sumo Bar. You want backlinks from Forbes, the Huffington Post, or CNN.
The way to get quality backlinks is to generously give out backlinks on your own. Sooner or later, you will get some nice backlinks in return.
- Label your images carefully
If you have an image of Nancy Pelosi on the beach, don’t label it Img.03.JPG. You may know what the image is, but Google bots, who can’t look at images, don’t.
Neil Patel also said something rather brilliant, that Google’s bots are like a baby, you have to spoon feed them.
- Choose your domain name carefully
A person should be able to tell in seconds what a domain is all about. If you can’t then Google and other search engines will be confused.
- Use the H1 Tag only once
Google is looking for the essence of your page in both the title and it will be looking for an H1 tag. The H1 Tag screams this is important.
However, if you use the H1 Tag 5 times, Google will be confused as to the nature of your content.
- Write for customers, not for Google
When you write, you want to be interesting but above all clear and concise. People used to use tons of keywords in their articles to attract Google’s attention.
Stop it. Use no more than 5 keywords in your articles and concentrate on readability.
- Write great meta descriptions for every page.
Keep your meta description to 155 characters or less. Use action words, a call to action, and make each page’s meta description unique.
- Write good content
This one would seem obvious, but people get so hung up on SEO they forget about what the reader wants. Remember Google wants what your reader wants.
- Have web analytics in place.
Both Google Analytics and paid software will help keep you focused. Remember famed baseball player Yogi Berra’s adage, “If you don’t know where you are going you might not get there.
- Be original
People are sick and tired of seeing and reading the same thing. Add a touch of flair to your website that gives people an idea that there are real people behind it, not robots running the store.
