Have you ever searched for a product on the internet, or you searched for a topic, and a series of site tabs appeared on the first page of your screen? The secret behind these sites appearing at the top 5 go-to sites or high ranking sites is a result of SEO. The acronym, SEO, means search engine optimisation.
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As it sounds, it amplifies the visibility of a website, video, or blog. Little wonder, when we search for certain topics, several ads sites and websites roll out at the click of the search icon.
The implication of this is that we tend to click these first-to-appear websites, which leads to traction and leads for owners of those websites. The importance of SEO is that it boosts a company’s website traffic. Traffic means more money for the company.
Further, companies who optimise their blogs and sites have the opportunity to market their products and services, and make them more popular, because they would rank higher than others, when searches for certain words are conducted. In this article, we shall look at how businesses can rank high through three SEO components, and increase traffic, leads and sales.
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Keywords
Keywords are the basic components of SEO and a strategy for optimising your website or blog. Including keywords in your title and header tags, meta descriptions, and body copy help to make your website very relevant when users search for certain keywords. However, using any keywords does not guarantee that your website will rank higher when users search for keywords. It takes several techniques to make your website rank higher. There are two basic techniques – long-tail keywords, and location-based keywords.
Long-tail keywords are all about using words and phrases, to sum up, your site. For example, if your site is on sales of apparel, you might think that words like “apparel” might help in ranking. While it might sound like a good idea, when users might search for the word “apparel”, it might direct them to elsewhere, because there are thousands of sites that have the phrase “apparel”.
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Users might search for the word “apparels” for various reasons such as photos, forums, films, etc. But people who want to buy “second-hand female apparel”, can easily find themselves on specific websites. The best way to go about this is using long-tail phrases such as “second-hand female apparel”, which can make your site rank higher and have the possibility of generating leads.
The second type of keyword is
location-based keywords. For example, if you’re dealing with second-hand female apparel, it is best to use phrases that are specific such as “second-hand female clothing in Surulere, Lagos” so that people who want to buy female clothes in Nigeria can easily find themselves at your site.
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Content
Contents have been identified as tools that help websites to rank higher on searches. Quality boosts the ranking of websites. It is advised that contents should be relatively short and full of quality. Writing a comprehensive topic on what your company or product is all about is very key. Furthermore, the contents ought to be refreshed. Search engines prefer fresh sites. Therefore, if you want your site to rank high and get more visitors, then you have to refresh your site. When you leave it for months without revisiting and refreshing, your site might not get the needed leads. Maintaining and updating sites are the best way to use SEO.
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Internal Linking
Internal linking is done through various means. The first method is to link two or more related sites on one page. For example, if your content is talking about the housing estate business, you can link it to another post that talks about land and housing. Also, you can ask bloggers and site owners to reference your sites on their own. You can also guest blog for other blogs, where you can seek permission to link your website contents in their contents.
Featured Image Source: Mike Gingerich
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