If you have a startup and are looking to get it off the ground, you need to understand the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). The good news is that there are many simple steps that can be taken to optimize your website and boost your online presence in front of potential customers. In this article, we’ll provide some basic tips and advice for getting started with SEO.
It all starts with an informed SEO strategy
An SEO strategy is more important than you might think. What you do now will set the tone for how your site ranks in the future, and it’s a good idea to get it right from the start.
There are four types of strategies:
- Good — You can do OK with a mediocre strategy as long as things don’t change much. For example, if all you want is higher rankings on Google but don’t mind if they don’t stick around for long or don’t affect other searches very much (like local search results), then this kind of approach will work fine for now.
- Great — This is what most people aim for when creating an SEO plan: great scores that stay consistent no matter what keywords people type into their searches or where they’re searching from (local vs global). It’s also possible to achieve “great” rankings across multiple platforms like Yelp and Bing at once—but keep in mind that there’s often some overlap between competitor sites when doing so!
- Terrible — This strategy has high risk because it’ll never give back enough value over time due to a lack of consistency across different areas where the content appears online. It’s better off avoided altogether unless there’s really no other choice left available today…or perhaps later down the road after some major updates have been made here on Earth 😉
Make sure your website is accessible to both search engines and users.
Your website should be easy for both humans and search engines to read and understand. This will help with its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s also important that the site loads fast on any device, including mobile phones. The faster a page loads, the happier people are going to be—and the more likely they are to stay on your site instead of clicking away from it because it took too long for them to get what they wanted from it.
Provide high-quality content on your pages.
- It’s no secret that Google has been cracking down on low-quality content. To stay relevant in a world of “first-page” results, you need to make sure that your website is providing high-quality content — because if it isn’t, then you may be missing out on valuable search traffic.
- What makes content high quality? High-quality content is not only useful and accurate, but it also meets the needs of its audience by answering questions or providing solutions to problems. The best way to determine if your site has high-quality information is through analytics data (preferably Google Analytics) and user experience testing (i.e., asking users what they think).
Optimize your title tags and meta descriptions.
The title tag and meta description are two of the most important elements of your website. They’re what people see when they search or browse your site in their browser, so it’s important to get them right.
Title tags should be no more than 70 characters long—that includes spaces, hyphens, and other characters that don’t count as letters or numbers.
This is a title.
Meta descriptions are similar: they appear below the meta-title when someone searches Google or Bing (or whatever other search engines they are using). They should be no more than 150 characters long because there isn’t enough room in such a small space to include all of your content! To make sure you’re including all relevant keywords without going over budget, try using a tool like Yoast SEO (on WordPress) so it can tell you how many words each field needs to accommodate before any others will fit.
Make use of header tags.
Header tags are the most important tags on a page, and they’re one of the easiest ways to organize your content. They should be used to create a hierarchy of content so that readers can easily scan through it and find what they’re looking for.
Optimize your images.
As an SEO, you can make your images more search engine friendly by giving them descriptive alt attributes and ensuring that they’re high quality. You’ll also want to make sure that the image is relevant to the page.
The first step in optimizing your image is to use a tool like Moz’s sitelink explorer or Ahrefs’ backlink checker. These tools will crawl all of your links and tell you which ones no longer exist or need updating. Then, head over to Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools). There are two main things that this tool tracks: crawling errors and indexing errors. Indexing errors will show up as red crosses on the Fetch as Google feature in Chrome DevTools—these are problems with how well your site gets indexed by search engines like Google and Bing (e.g., disorganized navigation). Crawling errors occur when robots find broken links or other pages on your website—sometimes these can even get flagged for malware!
Internal links are crucial for SEO purposes.
Internal links are the links from one page of your website to another page of your website. Internal links help search engines understand the structure of your site, as well as how important pages are related to each other. They also make it easier for users to navigate between pages on your site by providing clear paths through content that’s relevant to them.
Internal linking is an essential part of building a successful SEO strategy because it helps both search engines and users understand the context around the terms they’re searching for (and it’s also just generally a good thing!).
Create compelling and useful content that will gain inbound links from other websites.
- Create compelling and useful content that will gain inbound links from other websites.
- Use the Google Keyword Planner to find keywords with low competition, high volume, and a high cost per click (CPC).
If you follow these points, you can get the basic SEO ready!
Now that you are done with the basics, it’s time to go ahead and start implementing these tips so that your startup can get some more organic traffic.
- You will get more traffic to your site
- You will get more visitors
- You will get more customers
- You will get more sales
- You will get more profit
- And lastly, you will also be able to attract more funding opportunities for your startup!
