SEO can be daunting for those who are just starting, and with so many articles on the subject, it can even be more daunting piecing together different information.

Let’s start with the basics. Consumers today live in a digital world. Almost all consumers today search online before making a purchase – right now take a moment to consider how integral search engines are to our lives today. We search when we want to know something, when we want to find something, when we want to compare something, when we want to purchase something, and so forth.

SEO in its purest form is the practice of ranking a website on a search engine, to attract relevant and valuable traffic to your website. With every experience strategic marketing plan, SEO is an integral component of it and can become a fundamental part of your small business success.

Now, before jumping into these basic tips, note that SEO is a long-term game plan. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, so you will not see results right away. But, as you slowly start to use these tips to build up your SEO, you will see a rise in organic traffic to your website.

How to Optimize Your Website Using SEO Basics

• Use a blend of graphics, photos, and text. Sometimes, web designers will create images with text on them as a workaround for creating a unique layout or design. While this can look great, it’s actually harmful for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is strengthened when your Website consists of a blend of graphics, photos, and text.
• Label your graphics and photos using your keywords. Rather than labeling your graphics and photos “Photo1.jpg” consider using your business name or your keywords to label each graphic and photo: “Showit Website Design – Be Bold Design Studio.jpg” will be more effective.
• Use at least 500 words on every page. Google is crawling the Internet to learn about and assess your Website. Make sure you have at least 300 words of text on every page of your Website, so Google has something to “pull from” when learning about your Website.
• Link to your social media platforms. Link externally to your social media platforms. Doing so will enhance your SEO and help Google to point people who are searching for your business in the right direction.
• Create Keyword-rich content. When you are creating content, consider the kind of key words that users will search for. And also in the same vein, you’ll want to outline your content areas to make sure that you’ll be publishing consistently within each of your major categories. You want your content to be evenly distributed among all your categories so that you’re offering quality value for each sub-topic you’re claiming to cover on your blog. Think about how these categories will be organized and what kinds of posts you’d want to create within each. For example, Be Bold Design Studio usually publishes Web Design, Branding, Marketing and Small Business related content because that is the kind of target audience we are looking for.
• Optimize your URLS. Our URLs matter, as much (if not more than) your chosen domain name. When you publish a blog post and a unique page is created, the URL may be automatically created based on the title of the post if you don’t pay special attention to this. But that’s not good SEO, as your URL should be short and descriptive, even if that means it differs from the title of your blog post. In fact, your title and URL should almost always be different since they serve totally different purposes. Your title may be longer and may include ‘stop words’ (like to, and, from, with, etc.) which are meaningless mumbo-jumbo to the Google bot that’s gonna crawl your site and try to decipher what it’s all about. Optimize your URLs with short-tail and long-tail keywords that capture the gist of the content topic in order to reap the rewards.

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