How to Do My Own SEO: Three Steps to Get Started
If you’re like most business owners with a website, you’ve asked yourself, “I wonder how to do my own SEO?” Search engine optimization is a cloudy business – there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and not necessarily because folks are trying to mislead you: it’s a rapidly changing world where SEO best practices must be revised regularly.
Because we work with so many businesses across the country to build and manage their websites, we discuss SEO a lot. So, before we go into the three simple steps you can take to get started with your own SEO, let’s take a quick look at what SEO actually is.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an effort to improve your website’s ranking in search engine results. Let’s say you run Mike’s Plumbing Supply in Detroit, MI. At a minimum, you want to make sure your site is ranking highly when someone uses Google or Bing to search for “mike’s plumbing supply detroit.” You also want to make sure you’re ranking highly for searches that don’t include your city, i.e. “mike’s plumbing supply.” Beyond that, it would be ideal if your website ranked highly for “plumbing supply detroit.” Search engine optimization encompasses the effort to increase your search ranking, which will drive more quality traffic to your website.
When you work with HubRunner, we’ll handle your “on-site” SEO. That includes things like making sure your keywords are distributed properly within your page content, along with a lot of other technical issues like tags, headers, a properly structured site map, fast page load times, and more. This is a great jumping off point, because you can rest assured you’re building on a solid foundation. So…now what?
Step 1: Add a blog to your site and add a new post each week
Adding a blog to your HubRunner site is easy – you can just email or call your account manager. We’ll show you how to use it — and, if you don’t want to post yourself, you can just send us your blog post text and we’ll lay it out and post it for you! Coming up with a list of topics is easy. Just start with a list of keywords your customers are using when they search for your product or service. If you want more help with this, check out HitTail.
Step 2: Build your social media following
Don’t get overwhelmed by working on too many networks at once: start with just Facebook and Twitter. Allocate a small budget to increase your following on each network, and use their ads to build your following in a targeted manner. Here’s a page where you can learn about using Facebook ads to increase your likes, and here’s a page where you can learn about using Twitter ads to increase your followers. Also, consider using Pluggio to streamline your efforts.
Step 3: Share your blog posts on social media
As your social media following grows and you become comfortable writing one blog post per week, share your blog posts on social media. When you share a blog post on Facebook, consider “boosting it” (learn more here).
Keep in mind, these steps aren’t the “end all” of SEO – they’re just three simple steps you can take today without committing too much time each week to this effort. Now you know how to do my own SEO!
Rock climber photo attribute: http://bit.ly/1uRUaBK
Comments are closed.