It’s no secret that you’ve got to master the search engines if you want to get seen online. If you’re not on the first page of results, then you may as well be invisible. As a new or small business, this can feel
rather intimidating to say the least. You can get there, though, if you know the rules of SEO. Here are the top SEO rules you should know and how to use them in your content.
Bring in The Inbound Links
Your site needs to have other sites linking to it. This is because search engines essentially think of your site like a celebrity. The more people are talking about you, the more important you must be. That’s why the links pointing to your site are so important. The more you have, the more search engines will take notice and bump you up in the rankings. In addition, be sure that the sites that are linking to you are quality sites.
Don’t Abuse Keywords
Now, you’re going to need to use keywords in your content. These are the backbone of SEO, and they show search engine crawlers exactly what your content is about. Years ago, writers would stuff their content full of keywords to ensure that they were getting the visitors to their sites.
These days, this practice is very much frowned upon. In fact, search engines will now penalize any site they find doing it. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use keywords at all; it just means that you have to be careful about how you’re using them.
Select your keywords carefully and make sure you’re using words that are relevant to what your readers will expect of the piece. Be selective about where you use them in your content. The keywords need to fit naturally and make sense within the context of the piece.
Use Professional Writing Services When Needed
Sometimes you won’t be able to create your content yourself. It could be that you don’t have time, or you’re unsure of how to use SEO to your best advantage. This is where you should look into bringing in expert help.
You may be surprised to learn that
professional writing services
are the best place to get this help. The writers at such services are experts in writing all kinds of online content, fitting their skills into a wide variety of different industries and subjects.
Generate Unique Content
It’s vital that you’re creating content that readers want to see. If your content is derivative, uninteresting, or something that’s done better elsewhere, you won’t get the clicks and views that you need. If that happens, your site will disappear down the rankings. Of course, you don’t want this to happen. This means that you’ll need to create content that’s unique to your site.
Keep Updating
The key to a site that stays relevant is staying active. Your readers will click away from your site if they find it hasn’t been updated recently, and search engines will drop you in the rankings as a result.
This means that you need to have a schedule for updating and stick with it. You don’t have to update every single day to stay relevant, so don’t worry about that if you’re just starting out. Instead, try to update once or twice a week. This is enough to keep your site relevant and keep readers coming back. When this happens, you’ll be ranked more highly as your site is active.
They key here is to stay motivated to write for your site. Set time aside every week to produce high quality content for your readers; if this proves too difficult, get help from a professional service to provide the content for you.
Avoid Black Hat Tactics
In the past, “black hat tactics” were as a sneaky but effective way to get search engines to bump your site up the rankings. They were always considered rather underhand, and now search engines take a very dim view of them. If you’re found to be using them, then you may find your site isn’t showing up in search results at all.
Even if you’re trying to stay above board when it comes to your SEO, you may find you’re being penalized for issues that you didn’t know you had. For example, take your outbound links. If your font color is too close to the link color, then it can be seen as you trying to hide links. This used to be a tactic for stuffing links into content unnoticed. Watch how you create content, and correct issues when they arise.
These rules of SEO will help you create content that will get you noticed online. Once you know the rules, it’s much easier than you’d think. Give them a try and see for yourself.
Author:
Jennifer works as online editor at Best Australian Writers . Also, she is a business developer that works in different areas of education, technology, security and various types of online marketing. Prior to business developing Jennifer was consultant at Deloitte, and managed security services provider and developer of a wide range of security solutions.
