For an online business, one of the most critical factors for continued growth and success is effective SEO. However, SEO strategies change over time as search engine algorithms evolve. Online retailers need to stay on top of best practices in order to maintain the highest possible rankings for their chosen keywords. Let’s look at five SEO strategies that can help optimize your website for today’s online business environment.
Embrace Social Media
Social signals have become a major component of good SEO. If you want to have a strong online influence and establish authority in your area, it’s important to have a solid social media presence on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The goal here is to have an interactive experience with the reader and provide quality content. If this is done correctly social media will provide that interaction that is needed and will increase traffic to your site.
Invest Time in Keyword Research
Keywords remain an essential pillar of any business’s SEO strategy. You need to ask yourself what keywords people might use to discover your business in a search results page. Effective keywords can be a huge driver of traffic to your website. If you find that certain keywords are too competitive in your particular niche, choose a few long-tail keywords to stand apart from the competition.
Focus on Quality Content
Everyone knows that “content is king”, and the benefits of quality content go beyond the SEO benefits. Not only will good content help boost your rankings for relevant keywords, but it will also create a better user experience for potential customers. To accomplish this make sure that it is relevant to your focus and that it will provide a read that is useful to your audience. Remember the whole picture is to create the best user experience.
Build Solid Backlinks
In the old days of SEO, backlinks were a numbers game, with quantity trumping quantity. The game has changed since then, and having a massive network of dubious backlinks can actually hurt your SEO. Put effort into creating quality backlinks, by reaching out to popular blogs, submitting press releases and consistently creating content that people want to share. The more quality content that you provide and the more sites that it is published on will mean show the search engines that your site is more authoritative.
Effective Use of Images
When you think about “content”, don’t forget about images. If you have quality images on your website, and make sure that those images have critical keywords in their file names, those images can garner some serious rankings in the search engines. Images for Orangesoda.com have proven to be a major force in driving traffic to their website: a great example of SEO done right.
As you can see, there are multiple elements to effective search engine optimization. The rules of SEO are always evolving to improve the experience of the reader: If you want to keep your rankings high, it’s important to stay on top of the latest strategies and maintain a leg up on the competition.