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SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. 

This post is designed to give you an overview of the importance of SEO and how you can use it to make a greater impact in your business.

Your goal when using an SEO strategy is to make your website appear on the first page of search results when people search for branded and non-branded words related to your business. While Google, the obvious king of all search engines, and other engines (i.e. Bing, Yahoo, etc.) will never release their exact algorithms, there are a few things that you can do to improve your rankings and to track your progress.

To get started, here are a few of the tools I recommend:

1. SEM Rush makes personalized recommendations for your domain based on how your site performs against the 20 known ranking factors.
2. AHRefs is great if your business is targeting people in a certain geographical area and how you perform in the ranks for those particular areas
3. Yoast is especially useful if you utilize a WordPress site. Functioning as a plug-in, it helps you by providing built-in recommendations. However, it does not show how you perform for keyword rankings.

One big thing that people tend to overlook in SEO work is the usability of a site.

If you have a high bounce rate or low time spent on site (looking for a minimum of 2 minutes on a page), then you are likely to rank lower in searches. Search engines see this data as a reflection of the user’s experience with your site. If you are unable to a viewer on a page, then they either did not find the information they were looking for or it wasn’t user-friendly enough.

Next, there needs to be a strategy around the content that is published on your site.

Once you know your target market, you’ll be able to create content that is generated with them in mind and the things they are going to be searching for. There is so much content floating around on the internet. The key to making your content matter is getting views, shares, and having your viewers click through on the links that you have throughout your posts.

Make sure that you are promoting your posts on all your channels.

If you aren’t promoting your content, then you will simply be speaking to the abyss. Linking to relevant posts on your social pages and especially in your newsletters will help your pages get more views and as your content gets better then it will get more shares.

When it comes to getting eyes on posts here at SocialGreatness.Co, we find that Pinterest is the number 1 source for new readers and to schedule our pins, we have developed a strategy through Tailwind and it’s Tribes.

Lately, we have also been using CoSchedule for scheduling out our blog posts to keep our most popular content circling across Facebook and LinkedIn Pages.

One of the most important aspects of your content is including relevant links. 

It’s also important to have internal links to other items of content. The more that an article has links to it (both internally and from other blogs) the more reliable the bots will find it.

For instance, if you are loving this content but need more help with your SEO but need ideas of what to blog about, grab my FREE Content Guide today!

(See how I did that?) 

The bots scrolling your pages see your content as more helpful when it includes outbound links. With that, try to reach out to other bloggers that talk about similar information and see if you can each give each other a shout out.

This will boost your traffic as well as your trustworthiness to the bots.

Finally, you need to be including images with descriptions, meta descriptions, and links.

Including images is great and makes readers linger longer than they do on a post without images. However, images need to include descriptions and alt-text since search engine bots do not have eyes and cannot see how great your image is. They work off your descriptions to understand what you’re showing and how it applies to your content.

A meta description is a description of about 40 to 60 words that show underneath your title in the search engine. This helps explain to the reader what information they will learn. This is a great place to utilize three MAIN keywords. However, do not keyword stuff your meta-description.

So, now that you know a bit more about SEO than before you popped onto this page, what is going to be your first step in strengthening your SEO?