When you think about what SEO strategies to use when optimizing your website. You need to think on two levels, the visitors to your website and the search engines, who will decide if your website has value to those visitors. Although Yahoo and Bing should not be dismissed as important search engines for being listed, and gaining traffic. Google has the lions share of users, so for the benefit of this article, I will be using Google as a reference.

1. Choosing niche related keywords and key phrases.

Before you start building a website, the first stage is to find the keywords and key phrases directly related to your niche market. They should have a good level of search volume, 500 monthly searches or more is a good basic guide. These days, there really isn’t a definitive number, because there are billions search terms, and ten of millions of website. The higher the monthly search volume and the lower the competition (other websites trying to rank for the same term), is also be a good place to start.

Keyword research is a lengthy tasks, but it’s better to do your research first. The worst position you can be in is to randomly choose a keyword, build a web page around it. Only to realize later that no one is searching that term. Worst yet, you have no hope of ranking for it. There are paid and free keyword research tools around that can speed up the process and save time. Each different tool will give you slightly different results, which may seem confusing.  It actually depends on the actual data it produces.

Using more than one tool, and crosschecking those results, should give you enough information that tell you how many people are interested in what you’re selling. There is also Google’s keyword planner tool, which is free, and will give you the most accurate monthly search term figures. Although it does not give out competition data.

2. This SEO strategy is one of the most important to master. When you build content for each of your web pages. Put your main keyword in the title and in the body of your text. Then, use one or two related keywords throughout the page. Make sure it reads naturally, is interesting and makes sense to the reader. It should also have at least one image or short video. You should be creating content that appeals to people first, and will keep them engaged with your page. At the same time, satisfying Google’s content creation criteria.

3. Make sure all the content on your website is original, and there are is NO duplication of content that already exist online. I can’t stress how important this aspect of SEO is for website owners. If Google deems any content on your website is copied from another source, you could be heavily penalized. They will mark your site as a “copy website with little vlaue”, then drop you out of their listings, drop your rankings.

If you find any copy content on your website, remove it instantly. Checking all your content is a very easy process to complete. There are a number of good free content checkers available online. Usually they do have a restricted number of times you can use them in a day, and may only show a limited number of results, but they do show enough results. Enough to tell you if there are copies out there. Leaving this process to chance is not worth the risk. No matter how well you optimize your site to gain recognition with the search engines. It would all be in vain if Google slaps a penalty on your website!

4. On page SEO.

On page SEO is making sure the content you have on each page of your site is as optimized as possible. This includes adding meta tags, alt tags (naming your image). H-1 tags, H-2 tags, keywords relating to the content of the page. Most importantly the title tag and description tag. If you were to miss one or two on page SEO factors out. Don’t make it the title tag or the description tag. Those tags are read first information the search engine’s algorithms will see. It tells them what the rest of your web page is all about.

5. Off page SEO.

Off page SEO includes brand awareness, back-links, social media, video sharing sites (YouTube) and more. I would say the BIG FOUR are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Google +. There are many others, but if you use these four, they will help your website get more attention across the Internet. Followers, fans, connections and popular circles. YouTube is the largest video sharing site, and is very popular. You can gain good brand awareness, a quick video vote channel subscribers and more. If you are managing your social media accounts, try to interact with them, at the very least on a weekly basis.

6. Visitor Engagement.

Engaging with visitors to your website is also a priority on Google’s optimization radar. It is also a major indicator that all search engines use to determine value, listings and ranking of a website. If the information on your page is interesting and engaging, to keep a visitor on it longer. The search engines will see that as a page with a level of value to visitors who land on it.

Use video and images to make your website more interesting to visitors. When uploading a video, try to make it short and concise. For images, make sure they are not too large. You can use free image optimizer online to reduce them. Too many large images can affect a website’s speed load times, and Google sees fast loading websites as a priority these days.

7. Monitoring Your Website Performance.

Google Analytic has an “Audience Overview” area. It will show your “Bounce rate,” Avg. Session Duration (how long a visitor stays on your site), Pages/Session (the number of pages a visitor click on). Along with more analytical data that will help you address areas of your site that need attention, to improve visitor engagement. Google analytics is a very useful free tool all website owners should use. If you don’t already have an account, open one soon. Generate the code script an place that HTML script in the text area, of every web page of your site.

The code will the collect sort, and analyze date to give you a complete overview of your site’s performance online.
If your site is a WordPress site, you can install the Google analytic plugin. You will then have it showing in your WordPress dashboard, and you can see at a glance how many people visits your site and more.

This list of SEO Strategies is really quite simply to follow. Although some may be time consuming, it will be time worth spent. Up date your website at least six times a year with new content, making sure whatever content you add, is fully optimized.
Author Bio:

April Joyce is a SEO Expert in London having freelanced for several years. she now provides SEO services and professional consultation to small and medium size businesses.