Six Basic SEO Tips for 2016

Coming up with a good keyword strategy is difficult, especially in this day and age when everyone knows the benefit of having their site search engine optimized. With every site on the Internet trying to lay claim to their own little space on the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) it becomes incredibly important to know how you can get yourself near the top of the results pages. With that in mind, here are six important tips to take into account for your search engine optimization.

Keep a Steady Stream of Content Coming Out

In today’s fast paced world, if you aren’t coming up with something new and insightful on a semi-regular basis, you will drop in the search engine listings. That is why content is king when it comes to search engine rankings. Over the years search engines—Google especially—have created tools that sift through a website’s pages to see if there is useful content for the inquiring mind to view. These tools, like the Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird algorithms that Google uses, work to differentiate spam from what’s real while hunting for the best content to show to people. If your pages fail to get the attention of these search engine programs, then your SEO is not quite up to snuff because they were made to pick out the best and put them at the top of the page. 

Use Your Buyer Personas

When you are working to create good content that will rank in the top 10 on a results page, make sure that you create your content based off of what your buyer persona would want to find. This is important because a buyer persona is what you should be basing the entire marketing campaign of your company on. You created a persona so that you could attract the right types of attention to your site. So you should use it again and again when you are trying to get attention for your company. Your buyer persona will lead you to the creation of content that your potential visitors will want to see, and with that you will be able to create searchable content. For example, if your company creates car batteries then approaching your content from the viewpoint of your personas will give you the idea to create a title to your content and a long-tail keyword along the lines of “which car batteries are best in the summer?” Or your question can be something equally as likely to generate traffic to get it pushed up in the result pages.

Find a Program That Researches Keywords for You

There are plenty of programs that will help a company figure out which keywords are the best to use while trying to generate good SEO. What you want to do is start with a Google search for a term you are interested in, then find the complete phrases that the search engine gives you. With those, you can go through various programs to determine how likely it is that you can snag a high ranking with a particular keyword. Using programs like Hubspot can help your SEO while making the process faster and easier to manage. Never doubt that there is something out there that no other company has tried to use, because the breadth of human imagination knows no bounds and what people will search on any random day is incredible.

Create Specific Long-Tail Keywords

One of the best tricks that you can use when trying to get your company noticed by Google and other search engines is to create for yourself a long-tail keyword, which is almost exactly what it sounds like. It is an extension of a simple word that has a sentence or focused section of words around your main keyword so that you are locking down a particular form when people are searching for things. For instance, if a potential customer searches for information on the company “Podio,” they will not use only the single words in their search, instead they will try “How can Podio help me?” and that is the type of long-tail keyword that you want to use to differentiate your blog from others.

Keep Evolving Your Website and Content

There has never been a time when you could keep your content the same without generating anything new, but now the pace is far more rapid than ever before. Generating new content will help your website rise in the rankings, because it shows that your website is still active and your company is still alive. There are a lot of factors in search engine optimization, but the most important factor is that the search engines will look for active sites rather than inactive ones, and Google especially will track the release of content and rank you accordingly.

Don’t Mistake SEM for SEO

When searching for something on Google, no doubt you’ll have seen that the first few results that come up are advertisements. These are examples of search engine marketing, or SEM, instead of search engine optimization, SEO. There are pros and cons to both and they are often used in conjunction with each other, it just depends on a company’s goals and budget. SEO is great for bringing in an often slower but continuous stream of leads over time. SEM is great for giving your campaign an added, but temporary, boost. If you decide paid search makes sense for your goals, just be sure to avoid making common mistakes when running an SEM campaign, and keep in mind that some prospects might use ad blockers. If that is the case, your ads in a search engine like Google wouldn’t show up but your blogs would.

With these six tips for SEO, you should have enough to be able to start making some new content. With the right stream of content, you will bring your website to Google’s and other search engine’s attention. If you use your buyer personas to determine the content you make, you will make quality content that is moved up in the rankings. If you create long-tail keywords unique to your content, it is less likely that another company will be able to oust you from the position you gain. An evolving website will constantly re-attract the attention of the spiders search engines send out to get a feel for your content. Keeping all of this in mind as you generate your content will help you think about what you are creating, and what you are saying about your company with everything you release. Hopefully, with everything you make, you tell the search engines and your potential customers that you are a hardworking, consistent, and intelligent company that deserves its place at the number one spot on the search engine results page.