Clicky

How To

How to appear in online search engine results

Posted on
February 16, 2021
Segment
Marketing Team
SEO plans from $1,199/month

All the value you need from an SEO agency. Request a free audit and proposal to uncover SEO gaps across your site.

GET STARTED TODAY

As a business professional, it's important to make sure that you're using the right online marketing techniques. One of the most crucial parts of online marketing is improving your search rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Why is SEO important?

High search rankings will ensure that your site gets a lot of views, which can make it possible to reach more people. Here's what you need to know about improving your search rankings as a business owner:

While you need to consider many things in order to have a high-ranking site, your keywords, web content, and backlinks are some of the most important SEO inbound marketing strategies. Here's what you need to know to create the best possible SEO strategy:

Your keywords are essential to your SEO plan

Your SEO keywords are what people will type in to find your website, which means that it's essential to make sure that you select them carefully. Your keywords need to sound natural, and they should be designed for both text and voice search.

After you've selected your keywords, it's important to make sure that keyword density is somewhere in the range of 1-3%. This is enough to ensure that your site ranks as highly as possible, but it isn't enough to risk getting your site pulled from search engines.

Anything above a 3% keyword density is considered keyword stuffing, which is strictly banned by search engines. Not only that, but search engines are getting much better at detecting when content has more than 3% keywords.

Use local keywords such as your city, county, or state

In order to attract customers from your area, it's important to make sure that you use keywords that are region-specific. For instance, if you own a construction company in Atlanta, a good keyword might be "construction services in Atlanta". However, simply choosing "construction services" as a keyword could attract traffic from a wide range of areas.

Content is king when it comes to SEO

You need to make sure that your SEO content is well-written, well-organized, and keeps readers engaged until the end. This will help to ensure that they are impacted by your entire sales pitch. In fact, many digital marketing experts feel that having quality content is the most important part of reaching high search rankings.

In many cases, you'll need to hire a professional copywriter to make sure that you have the best possible content. Not only will this ensure that your site ranks well with search engines, but it will also help to ensure that your site has a high conversion rate. This means that a large portion of the people who read your content will end up buying your products.

It's important to get backlinks from credible websites

In order to ensure that your site ranks well with search engines, you need to get backlinks from other credible websites. Luckily, this is easier than you might imagine it to be. In fact, there are several ways that you can gather backlinks for your site, such as these:

1. Post links on forums and blogs

Forums, blogs, and social media websites are some of the best places to post backlinks. Not only can these sites get a lot of visibility, but it's very easy to make posts on these platforms. This can offer a highly effective and free way to get quality backlinks for your brand, which can boost your search rankings!

2. Network with other companies and influencers

One great way to get backlinks is to talk to other business owners in your area. Of course, it's important to make sure that the business owners you are talking to will not be your competition. Fortunately, there are many cases when two businesses in the same area can actually benefit one another.

For instance, people who are waiting to get a car repaired might want to visit a coffee shop in the area when they're waiting. These sorts of mutually beneficial relationships between two local business owners can give both parties a networking opportunity, and each business deciding to have backlinks to the other party's website could be mutually beneficial.

3. Avoid automated posts

Automated posts tend to be far less effective than ones that you write yourself, and there are several reasons for this. For one thing, content that's posted automatically on a website by bots may be in the wrong place to have the right impact on people. Furthermore, many forum moderators are very good at figuring out when a post was made automatically, which may result in your post being deleted and getting banned from the forum.

Keep up-to-date on the latest algorithms

The algorithms that search engines use determine the strategies that you'll need to implement in order to rank as highly as possible. As a result, it's important to look at the Yahoo, Bing, and Google website regularly to keep up to date on any changes to them. Luckily, most search engines regularly post information about what they look for when they're determining how to rank a website.

SEO can be complex, and it's best to contact a professional

In order to improve your search rankings as much as possible, it's important to make sure that you contact a digital marketing professional with expertise in search engine optimization. An SEO expert or SEO agency can allow you to design a website that ranks as highly as possible within search engines.

How to appear in online search results

There is no specific timeframe for when your website will appear in search engine results. Assuming you registered your site with Google Search Console (GSC) and Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT), it may take days or weeks for your website to be indexed by search engine crawlers. Adding and managing your sitemaps and robot.txt files are helpful in expediting the indexing process.

Additionally, it is advised to perform the following tasks:

Register your website with GSC and BWT

  • Submit your XML sitemaps.
  • You can additionally add your HTML sitemap in the footer section of your website

Sign up for Google Analytics

  • With Google Analytics, you can start monitoring your web activity, including your organic growth traffic

Improve your on-page SEO

  • Start blogging regularly using keywords from your keyword development strategy
  • Add meta descriptions, page titles, headers (H1, H2, etc.)
  • Set up clean and clear URL structures
  • Example of a clean URL: https://segmentseo.com/services
  • Example of a busy or unreadable URL: https://example.com/product.store/onlineshopping/123456/sneakers
  • Include the right keywords in your landing pages, web pages and blog articles

Create an off-page strategy to increase authority

  • This will eventually help your website improve its online authority, improving its ranking position
  • Consistently work with high-authority websites to build backlinks (off-page SEO)
  • Create social media channels and frequently share your content with your audience

Explore more updates

Technical
March 15, 2023

Google's search engine web crawlers are not what you think

Off-Page
November 10, 2021

Your guide to building quality backlinks

Metrics
January 10, 2023

Measure your website with these SEO metrics