If you want people to be visiting your site, then SEO optimization is the most important tool in your arsenal. While there is a lot of hype about using social media in order to get more site hits, SEO is still the most effective way at finding an audience and should be the main priority of any website.
Even though it is so important, many websites make the mistake of trying to utilize SEO without a clear strategy. If you try and deploy too many tactics, then you could find that your website is not performing as well as you would think. Here we will take a look at the importance of coming up with a clear SEO strategy, and what your plan should contain.
The Importance of an SEO Strategy
The problem with just plowing into SEO optimization blind and without a plan is that many things can end up lost in the mix. Without a clear plan, you will find that some pages will not be getting anywhere near the amount of hits that you were looking for, and it’s not always clear why that is happening. So the first thing you do before you start optimizing your site is come up with a clear plan that includes tactics for the present and for the future.
Having said that, coming up with a clear strategy is not rocket science. In fact, it is something that can be decided within a few hours. All you have to do is find out what exactly your site is for, and how you want to present it to people who find your site on search engines. This means thinking of keywords and subjects that you think are worth targeting. After that, you need to make sure that your website is comprehensive. In other words, do everything within your power to stop visitors from heading to a different site that has more information. Give people as much information as you can about your subject area, and they should never want to leave your site. You just need to make sure that the SEO of your site is top-notch first, so then people are able to find your site in the first place.
How To Make Your Site Valuable To Visitors
Another popular misconception about SEO is that all you need is the right keywords in order to generate website hits. This used to be true not that long ago, but now because websites like Google are trying to ensure that search results are always as relevant as possible, websites also need comprehensive and relevant information that relates to the search.
These changes have mainly come about because of the amount of people who have abused the system. So many websites decided to just have random SEO keywords to generate hits, even though they don’t have the relevant content to match. This worked for them to start with until it became clear that having visitors come back to the site and view related content is quite important. For that reason, the content now has to be relevant in order to keep people visiting.
The holy grail has now become a site that has plenty of SEO-optimized keywords, and also plenty of information that will please the site’s visitors. Not only that but having related pages that provide even more information will also make the visitors more inclined to stick with the website in the future. Search engines are looking for more of their results to offer their readers more in return when they click on your link. If you can provide that, then search engines will be more likely to give you a higher ranking.
Whenever you create new content for your site once you have finalized your SEO strategy, you have to make sure that it contains all the keywords you are looking for, and also has plenty of informative content that will keep the visitors interested. If you want to do something a little extra to try and get the visitors to stick with the site, maybe have a shortlist of related pages at the conclusion of the content so then people are able to see the related content you have clearly.
The Importance of Google Analytics
If you really want to give your SEO strategy a massive boost, then it is very important that you use Google Analytics at least on some level. If you want to make sure you get plenty of visitors, then it is probably important that you use Analytics every step of the way.
The custom options that come with Analytics give you a chance to find out which of your pages get the most visitors, and which ones have been the most useful. Having plenty of informative content, including reference material is probably the best way of securing plenty of visitors, so if you have plenty of pages that fall into that category, you should find your analytic results to be very positive.
Once you have the results, you can start thinking about coming up with a content marketing strategy to take your site to the next stage. By this point, your site probably has a clear identity among your regular visitors, so it’s important that you market the site to match that identity. While being seen as a reference site is not as flashy and sexy as being seen for having engaging or viral content, it is probably the most effective way of getting hold of more visitors.
The great thing about Analytics is that you can also run a check to see which relevant keywords you want to use that are the most popular. This way you can make sure that your new content is fully optimized for the more popular search engine queries, and also is able to have relevant and informative content.
There are of course other SEO strategies that could well suit your website better, but this clear guideline is the best one to use in order to familiarise yourself with all the factors that go into SEO optimization. Because the times are changing, it is now becoming more important that the content you have is relevant and up to scratch, as well as having relevant keywords that will generate more hits. If you have a clear strategy and you are able to have relevant content that is SEO optimized and contains relevant information, then your website will be able to move up the search engine rankings very quickly.
