SEO is a necessary part of marketing. If you ignore SEO or focus on outdated tactics, your search engine rankings will suffer and so will your business.
In part one of this two-part blog, we discussed the importance of keyword research and how you can perform a basic type of research to start your SEO plan. Once you have the results of your research, you can start utilizing that information!
Page Titles and H1 Tags
Now that you have a list of keywords you want to rank for, you can start the work of actually increasing your ranking. Again, SEO is a complex process. In order to be fully effective, you must utilize multiple tactics and utilize them consistently over a long period of time. However, there are still a few simple things you can do that will help—and those simple things are called page titles and H1 tags. Page titles and H1 tags represent important SEO real estate on your website (at least as of this writing). To make this explanation more clear, we’ll use our mobile website design page as an example.
Page titles are what you see in the top of your browser whenever you’re on a website. For our example page, the page title is “Mobile Website Design | Business Websites Designed for Mobile Browsing.” These are two keywords that we’ve decided to focus on. Putting the keywords in the page title is a signal to Google to pay attention. Most businesses choose to put their business name in the page title. This is a waste of valuable space!
H1 tags look a little different on each website depending on how the website is designed. On the example page, the H1 tag is “User-friendly Mobile Website Design.” Again, this is another keyword we’re targeting. H1 is an HTML tag that signifies the first header. Every website design should have an H1 tag. If your website doesn’t have one, talk to your web developer about adding one.
Before you start optimizing your page titles and H1 tags, heed this warning. Google is smart! If you use a page title and H1 tag that has nothing to do with the content on that particular page, it won’t help you. That’s considered a form of keyword stuffing, a practice that Google looks down on. In fact, Google has stated that some of their updates are designed to punish websites that stuff irrelevant keywords.
Create Content
You can devote hours upon hours to keyword research and integrating the best keywords into your page titles and H1 tags, but it won’t do you any good if you don’t have content on your website. Content is king and Google’s algorithm is focusing more and more on content-heavy websites. The trick is that the content needs to be relevant to users.
The best place to start adding content to your website is the Services/Products section. If you already have a section that describes your products and/or services, good for you. If you don’t, focus on that first. Ideally, each of your products and/or services should have its own page. Don’t forget to optimize the page titles and H1 tags!
Once you have a Products/Services section, you should consider creating a section for each of the industries you serve. While this doesn’t work for every business, it can definitely help those companies that work within several defined industries. For example, Bop Design has a page specifically created for law firm marketing.
If you’ve created a Services/Products section and an Industries section on your website, you’ve already proven that you can generate content. Now is a great time to start blogging! The more frequently you blog, the better, but that doesn’t mean you have to blog everyday. If you can only manage to blog once a month at first, that’s better than nothing. Just remember that your blogs should be relevant and useful. Start by answering questions you hear often, both from clients and from prospective clients. The blogs can do double-duty; the next time someone asks you a question that you’ve already blogged about, you can just send them a link to that blog post.
Once you’ve done your research, optimized your page titles and H1 tags, created pages for your products/services and the industries you serve, and you’re blogging regularly, you’re well on your way to increasing your Google ranking. There’s a lot more to SEO, but if you can master these tactics, chances are good that you’re ahead of the curve in your industry. Keep up the good work!
In case you missed the first blog post in this series, you can read it here: SEO Tips You Can Implement Today.
