SEO Advice

What is the single best piece of SEO advice you can give? I'm asked this a lot. The answer might surprise you.

Patience. You need patience to let Google find your pages, compare them to the eleventy million other pages the search engine has stored relative to the keyword phrase you optimized the page, to see how relevant and authoritative yours is compared to the others.

Back in the day, when websites and hosting was horribly expensive, it was easier to rank with fewer sites and pages. Remember when the internet was just a cool novelty?

Well now, we pretty much would be screwed without it to get the information we need.

So, if you want fast results, you're going to have to find the money for pay per click (PPC) to drive traffic to your site. But you still need to do your on-page optimization and put hard work into creating the very best landing pages you can do, because your PPC quality score hinges a lot on these factors.

It takes patience to find the right keyword phrases that most closely describe what you offer to get highly targeted traffic to your site that's much more likely to buy than just kick the tires.

It takes patience to think about writing the very best content you can, that answers all of your prospect's questions about what you offer. This could be as few as a couple hundred words, or it could be several thousand. As much content as it takes is the rule.

It takes patience to create unique, useful, compelling meta titles and descriptions that will lure web searchers to click on your link in search results, and not that of your competition. There's an art and science to writing titles and descriptions that are optimized, and say a helluva lot in a short space.

It takes patience to test and test and test different headlines, titles, descriptions and content to see where the sweet spot is to convert your prospects to buyers.

It takes patience to go through your web analytics to see the weak spots in your pages, and to fix them.

It takes patience to sit down, sit still and really plan a content strategy weeks and months ahead. Blogging is the biggest exercise in patience and discipline next to watching your content slowly climb in search results.

But with Google's algorithm, and the trillions of web pages out there, trying to get indexed and ranked just like yours, patience is what you have to cultivate and exercise.

No, it's not easy. It's frustrating as hell. You have to keep trying. That's what marketing is all about.

If you want to learn SEO and possibly bitch about being patient with others, come to an SEO training course and learn basic and advanced SEO to boost your pages up in search results.

Or, you can learn SEO online now through Invenio!

Until we meet again, keep it between the ditches.

All the very best to you,

Nancy

Image courtesy of flickr.com