By now we are sure that you have heard quite a bit about SEO and know that it is quite a big deal in the world of online and digital marketing. As with most people, you have probably also heard that SEO is quite a complicated process, and have been somewhat avoiding getting stuck into it. 

Well, we are here to set your mind at ease and give you some advice to get your SEO efforts started on your site. Remember, SEO helps Google understand what your site is about so that it can correctly categorize you in the search results and rank you correctly according to your competitors. So, if you are wanting to be found by your potential audience, which you do, we thought we would unpack some of the simple ways that you can start getting your SEO right today. 

Get Those Keywords On Your Site

The first step with SEO for any site is to start with keyword research. Keywords are the first basic element of SEO and how Google can understand your site. Here’s how it works. Google will scrape your site and its content to understand what words are being repeated throughout the site. So, say, for example, you buy and sell aircraft. This will have to be reflected on your site with words like “buy aircraft”, “sell planes”, “aircraft for sale” etc., being repeated throughout your site. 

It will understand that you need to be categorized in the aviation space, and based on the number and authority of your keywords and links, where you rank. But, the trick with keywords is not just to guess what they are. Yes, some keywords will not change or deviate from the core of what your business is. But, some keywords will change based on current search trends and what’s happening in the industry. 

Luckily, there are a number of online tools for you to make use of to look up relevant and current keywords. They will indicate the essential keywords that need to appear on your site, what your competitors are ranking for, and what trending keywords you need to include to stay relevant in search results. 

Pay Attention To Your On-Page SEO Elements

Now you understand your keywords and have been creating content for your landing pages around these keywords. The next thing to start looking at for every single landing page on your site are the various elements that need to be optimized. Let’s look at them in more detail. 

Title 

This is the title of the landing page. So, it could be Home, About Us, or, like this article, “The Basics of SEO: Four Things That You Can Start Getting Right Today”. For article titles, it is important to have a relevant keyword in the title. So, in this case, it would be “SEO”.

H1 and H2 Headings

These are the headings that appear in the course of the content, and breaks up the paragraphs and content for Google to easily read it. Your keyword should appear in one or more of these headings. 

Meta Description

This is the description that pops up in your search results, and is a two to three sentence explanation of the page, with the keyword appearing in the description. Every single page needs a different meta description to heighten your SEO. 

URL or Slug 

This refers to the link. This too needs to contain the keyword, which it should if it’s in your title. But it will also need to be optimized to remove any conjunctions. Keep it simple. 

This may seem really complicated and resource intensive, but if you are working with a platform like WordPress, you can use the Yoast plug-in to help you get these basics right every time you create a post. 

Spend Time On Your Links 

Links are a key aspect to SEO and link building is an important process that you cannot look over. Essentially, when Google scrapes your site, it also looks at what links are associated with your site, and determines your authority according to those links. 

So, you will have links going from your site to other sites, and links coming from other sites into your site. The trick is to ensure that those links going in and out are to and from authority sites. By this, we mean sites that are well established, known, relevant sites to yours. 

You can get this right by including links to and from your clients, citing relevant sources in your articles, and asking associate sites to link to you. By writing relevant content, you can ask other sites to share it on your behalf and link back to you from their site. Make sure, then, that your content is educational and informative, and packed wi0th keywords. A great CTA to your site and services will also do wonders to increase traffic from that site. 

Do Regular Audits

This is a very overlooked avenue of SEO that a lot of companies skip. But these audits are vital in pointing you in the right direction with your site. Firstly, they pick up where there is too little, or too much content on your pages. Yes, you can have too much, and if you are stuffing your content with keywords, Google will penalize you. 

Audits will also indicate where your broken links, pages and 404 pages are. Sites can be tricky, and things can break without you even being aware. Because these can impact your SEO, it is important to know where these broken pages are to heighten your SEO. 

The audits will also determine the loading speed of your pages. So, if there is an image, for example, that is slowing down your loading speed, you can fix it, re-upload it and cut down the time spent waiting for the page to load. 

As with the keyword research, you don’t need to do this manually. There are a number of platforms and tools for you to do an audit on your site. So, diarize regular audits and make sure that your site is totally optimized. 

Wrapping Up 

SEO can be a severely resource intensive process. There are a plethora of elements that go into getting SEO right, and tons of elements that you need to be aware of. Google updates their SEO requirements several hundred times a year, so it can be really tricky to keep up with it at all times. If this is too overwhelming for you, fear not, help is a mere click away. At AOM, we can assist it by doing an SEO audit, doing keyword research, and getting the key elements on your site optimized for SEO. So, speak to the professionals today, and let us get you ranking on the search results.