Most people have heard of it, but when we decide to inform our clients about the benefits of SEO-ing in their company, the general response is ,’Huh? ESO, OSE… what?’
For instance, if you search up ‘creative advertising companies’, the top result is going to have the greatest search engine optimisation. The following search page however, may have websites that contain a blog or two encouraging you to be your own creative advertiser. Of course, this may be somewhat helpful, but it is clearly not the most helpful resource in relation to what you searched.
To achieve effective SEOs, it takes an extensive amount of effort and time. If you want your website to be popular, there are certain measures you must take. You simply can’t expect to write irregular blog posts on a Weebly site and then gain thousands of views by the next week. Although we may wish that was the reality, it isn’t, and in such a competitive world, there are certain measures that must be undertaken to make your website a popular one.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Okay, so you might be a blogger, looking to gain an audience to gain some income, or you could be a company in need of some more clients. I’ll reiterate what I have already mentioned; you cannot make any money by not using search engine optimisation. At the beginning, a company or blogger can only gain recognition from their friends or family, as they are the only people who are going to know about it. However, if you utilize SEO-ing, then your website becomes advertised, meaning people you don’t know are getting to see it. When you get to view your website statistic and receive a like from someone you have never heard of, that’s pure gold… unless you don’t want anonymous people seeing it, then you might find it creepy.
There are several different methods you can use to optimise your search engine appearances below. Some of them may not seem as simple as you may have expected, but with marketing and journalism competition, laziness is never an option.
BLOGGING
So, you might have a company website. Sure, you may update it with occasional news here and there, but not everyone finds it interesting. There are greater ways to draw people into your website, and that way is by blogging.
Most websites that you will find at the top of a search page keep an updated blog. These blogs don’t cover those typical, boasting articles like ‘why you should invest in our company’, but cover a more relevant and entertaining topic. For example, a banking company might write blogs on how to save money. These kinds of topics are more attractive to the reader, as it can apply to their lifestyle in some way.
If you are a company that sells clothing, for instance, you shouldn’t be posting blogs on the top 10 foods in the area, as none of that information will be relevant to one of your shoppers. When writing blogs, you need to have a purpose that is oriented around your website’s content.
Within your blogs, there are several techniques you can utilise to further increase your SEO, which leads onto my next point.
GOOGLE ADS AND KEYWORDS
Google Ads is an application that allows you to find the likelihood of someone searching up a heading that you use.
For example, if you wanted to write a blog post about fashion trends, you shouldn’t make your heading just based on what you think of. Sure, you may have a on fleek heading in mind, but you don’t know how effective that will be at drawing in more readers and increasing your SEO. Google Ads allows you to search up the keywords you use within your heading and it will tell you (based on statistics) more common searched words that would be more effective in creating a better SEO. Ultimately, this means that more people are more likely to see your post because the words you have used in your heading are searched more frequently, meaning more people will be directed to your website.
It sounds complicated, but it is not as hard as it sounds. By identifying keywords that are more frequently searched and by putting them in your article’s heading or subheadings, more people are likely to stumble across your page.
You might ask if it is really necessary, but it is. There can be at least 500,000 more searches for a particular word as a pose to another word. Do you know what that means? It means that you have the potential to get 500,000 more views than you used to!
ANCHOR LINKING AND NETWORKING
You may never have heard of the term ‘anchor linking’, but you definitely would have seen it. Anchor linking is when text directs the reader to another page. This kind of text generally tends to be blue and underlined, like this. When you click on this text, it will take you to another page that is relevant to what the author is addressing.
What is great about anchor linking is that you can use it to take someone else to another one of your blog posts. If someone discovers a particular blog post on your website, then using anchor linking within your post can take them to another one of your blog posts so that you receive more reads. By doing this, you can gain another subscriber, as they will become familiar and interested with your writing!
The opportunities of anchor linking further expand when networking.
Sometimes certain inconveniences will occur, and you won’t always be able to maintain regular blog posts. This happens to a vast majority of bloggers, and here is where your opportunity fits in.
By subscribing to a substantial amount of blogs, you will discover when some begin to post irregularly, which is where you step into the spotlight and ask to make a guest post. As soon as you publish a post on this person’s website, you will find that it will attract an army of readers to your own website. It is highly likely that these people would not have seen your blog yet, and as soon as they read your material, they will be tempted to look at your page. This is not just because they admire your style, but because the writer they regularly read has found that your writing is worthy of posting, and believes that it will be beneficial to the readers in some way.
You can further encourage this audience to check out your page by maximising the amount of anchor links in your article. These links should obviously lead back to another article or post on your own page. And as soon as you know it, you’ll gain an audience!
At 360South, we don’t just use SEO-ing to support our own website, but other major companies too. While we write blog posts for some companies, we use anchor linking to connect the audience with more websites. We organise a heavy number of other writers to guest post on other websites, their posts including anchor links to companies that we write for. That way, the writers that we organise a guest post for gain recognition, and the audience of the site that they guest post on gets drawn towards our own clients.
It sounds like a tedious process, but it works, and everyone benefits from it, whether they gain recognition, or views.
AND THE MOST VITAL INGREDIENT…
Writing skills. Everyone has them to an extent, but you need to know how to use them to captivate your audience.
The best way to captivate and fascinate your audience whilst blogging is by using a lighter, comedic tone. After all, who doesn’t appreciate a good joke or two!When writing a blog post, you must keep in mind that the reader doesn’t want to read an essay about the economic advantages of buying particular items of clothing. They want a short and simple article that they can take something out of.
An ideal way to write an article is to limit the length of a paragraph to around 5 lines maximum. This ensures that what the reader is consuming is condense and to-the-point. Maintaining this lighter tone will ensure that the reader will come back for some more word digestion. Utilizing bullet points and lists are another effective way of keeping the article to-the-point.
The most effective way to express and display your writing skills are to combine all of these ingredients to create the perfect SEO recipe. With great writing skills, anchor linking, some networking and keywording, it is a guarantee that your website will grow to a great extent. You never know, for someday you might be the next BuzzFeed