Source: The Huffington Post
Attention! Having successful online marketing may sound easy, but it’s actually not as simple as it seems—you need to put in effort and care. With these four tips, you can get closer to making your online marketing successful.
Local Keywords
To attract visitors to your site, you need to identify the words and phrases that will match what you offer with how people are searching for your type of services. First, consider the scope of your business—whether it’s local or national. If it’s local, make sure to include your city name in your keywords. Instead of the keyword “plumbing services,” for example, use the keyword “plumbing services in Los Angeles.”
The goal is to isolate your competitors and determine exactly what business to attract to your site. Traffic is useless if it doesn’t do anything for you.
Long-Tail Keywords
To beat your competitors, you need to develop a keyword that is more specific—especially if your business is competing nationally. Focus on the core service or product you offer. For example, instead of “plumbing services,” use a keyword like “how to get a ring out of your pipes.” Instead of “dance classes,” use a keyword like “hip hop dance classes” or “jazz dance classes.” Search engines recognize these keyword variations differently.
Create a list of as many variations as possible, then narrow down the list based on the traffic volume of each keyword. Use tools like opensiteexplorer.org or ahrefs.com to evaluate who is using which keywords to attract traffic to their site. If you’re just starting out, choose a keyword with low traffic volume to give your business the chance to corner the market on that keyword. If you’re already a major competitor in your market, you’ll want to choose a keyword with higher traffic volume. Just be realistic in evaluating your current potential to outrank your competitors with the same keyword.
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
In any online search, title tags appear as the bold blue header text that is underlined, and meta descriptions appear as the content right below the title tags. Jones advises using keywords in both, for every page of a website—including blog posts. On the back end of a WordPress site, you can optimize both through an all-in-one SEO package.
Page Load Speed
Last but very important, you must pay attention to your website’s load speed. If it takes more than six seconds, search engines will penalize your site. Jones recommends that images should have a resolution no higher than 75 dpi, as higher resolutions will take longer than necessary to load. Additionally, keep the number of photos on each page to a minimum to avoid excessive time spent loading those images. Not understanding the importance of page load speed, Jones notes, is one of the main ways entrepreneurs compromise the success of their websites.
