3 Ways to Boost your SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of any digital marketing campaign. Here are 3ways that you can see real returns on your SEO efforts, and boost your search rank on search engines like Google.

1. Use Keywords across Content

You want all of your content to be SEO-optimized. A super simple way to do this is to add keywords to your content’s text, titles, and captions. Determine what keywords best describe your content by asking questions like “what search terms would users search to find my content?” and add those keywords to the body and title of your content.

Find ways to incorporate keywords into your content. A simple way to do this is by adding keywords to your titles. One option is to make a keyword the first word of your title and follow it with a colon and the original title. For example, “SEO: Increase your Search Ranking”. Notice how adding the keyword increases the likelihood that your content will be found by a user searching for “SEO” content.

Another easy way to add keywords to your content is by adding topic sentences at the start of each section that begins with your keyword. I did this at the start of this article: “SEO is (…)”. This increases the number of times a given keyword is referenced on a page and therefore boosts the page’s search ranking for that keyword.

2. Update Metadata

Metadata is one of the most important parts of building a website’s SEO strength. Metadata is the aspect of a webpage that describes to search engines what the page contains. The two necessary components of metadata are the title and the description. When both of these fields are completed, search engines like Google know what your page contains and therefore are better able to show your website to relevant audiences.

The metadata title should contain one to three keywords describing the content of your page. For example, if you have a blog with SEO optimization advice, you could title the blog page “SEO Increase Blog”, or use another synonym for “increase”. The title should not include long-tail keywords (keywords that are not searched for frequently and usually contain more characters). You should aim for short-tail keywords, which have fewer characters and are searched for substantially more frequently.

The metadata description can contain one or two long-tail keywords, but should similarly focus on short-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords can be included throughout your content, instead. The metadata description is written in full sentences and describes the content of your page in more detail than the metadata title.

3. Update Buttons to reflect Destinations

This one may sound a bit confusing, but in reality, it is quite simple and intuitive. Your website likely contains buttons linking to other pages or external websites with text like “click here” or “view here”. These are weak links because they do nothing to benefit your SEO or your search rank. These hyperlinked buttons lack a description of what is being linked to, which is not harmful to your SEO, but provides no benefit, when there is indeed an opportunity to do so.

Updating buttons additionally provides the benefit of informing your users where they will be redirected to when they click on a hyperlink available on your website that links to another page on-site.