We recently shared our thoughts on a common question.
“If you were speaking to a crowd of people who are all business owners and marketers but who know absolutely nothing about SEO, what would be the 3 top actions you’d advise them to understand & undertake right away?”
There’s a lot that goes into search engine optimization. If we had to provide only three tips for beginners than we’d offer the following suggestions.
1 – Build out a “healthy” website.
Unless you have more than a page or two on your site, you can do all the seo in the world and you won’t get anywhere. Search engines want to reward “authorities” in their vertical. The more information you can share about why you are a knowledgeable authority in your field than the more solid of a foundation you will establish to build your other seo efforts off of.
References:
https://www.seonational.com/googles-latest-panda-update/
https://www.seonational.com/panda-update-confirms-content-necessity/
2 – Make sure your site runs efficiently.
Now that you’ve added a lot of useful information to your site to show off why your product or service is the best of the best, let search engines access it easily. Use free tools like gtmetrix.com to find ways to make your site load faster. Site load time is confirmed as part of Google’s algorithm.
On the same topic of helping search engines access your site easily, tell them where all your good info is by adding a sitemap. By default, search engines will try and scan as many pages on your site that they can find. Why not just tell them where they are so they can find them faster? That’s exactly what a sitemap does. It’s a formatted list of where your content on your site. Create a free sitemap at xml-sitemaps.com.
Additionally, make your images load quicker by losslessly compressing them. Lossless compress retains the visual quality of an image, but significantly decreases the actual file size so it loads quicker. When we compress images for clients we see an average of 5 – 15% savings on each image. Some images save as much as 90% of their load while still looking just as nice. There is also a free tool for this, smushit.com.
References:
gtmetrix.com
xml-sitemaps.com
3 – Share you awesomeness.
You now have a nice website and it’s easy for search engines to find. Now, begin sharing it with the world. Go to forums or community-based websites that talk about your type of product or service. Participate in the discussions. Don’t go there and “sell yourself.” Instead, share your knowledge. Educate other site members. Once they learn how great you are in your industry they will often become a customer or vouch for you. The more people that you educate and introduce to your business = the more that will share the awesomeness they’ve learned about you. It all snowballs from there.