Three Important SEO Techniques You Are Overlooking

When running your online business, search engine optimization (SEO) is arguably the best marketing technique to pull in potential customers. While many online business owners and entrepreneurs can become skilled at SEO, the recent changes to major search engines such as Google along with trying to use the latest techniques result in overlooking some tried and true SEO measures that could help them pull in new customers.

What follows are three basic SEO techniques that you may not be fully exploiting in your efforts to pull in potential customers. Remember that you can pull in customers for your established products as well as your new ones by following these guidelines. Quite often, a product that you might have thought had run its course suddenly starts selling again thanks to revitalizing your old SEO techniques.

Title Tag

The title tag is generally the first step towards maximizing your SEO potential, but all too often it gets overlooked or perhaps even ignored because of newer SEO methods that get in the way. You should start by maximizing your title tag and revitalizing the ones on your older pages as well.

Keep it under 70 characters: Remember that characters include spaces as well, so your title tag should include a mention of the product and appropriate keyword.

Don’t get hung up on your company brand: While you may read in other SEO tips that having your company name or brand included in the title tag is a must, it is not necessarily so. In fact, the product that you are selling is the most important aspect, especially early on in your business.

Avoid keyword stuffing: It’s pretty easy to overstuff your title tag description and therefore your page with keywords. Instead of stringing along keywords, emphasize a single important one to maximize its impact. This way, your website will not be targeted by Google as one that keyword stuffs.

You’ll want to avoid the appearance of “over-optimizing” your title tags as this can be a big turn-off for potential visitors and customers as well. The idea is to present your business properly as one that attracts customers for the right reasons, not because they overuse the keywords.

Meta Description

Along with creating a compelling title tag, you will also need to have a solid, powerful meta description as well. All too often, meta descriptions get overlooked in today’s SEO world because Google has de-emphasized their power at affecting search engine rankings. However, while their SEO ability has been diminished, it is not gone and in fact can help serve to bring in customers through other means as well.

What follows are a few solid tips in getting the most out of your meta descriptions for each one of your pages. By employing these techniques, you can maximize your rankings along with the other SEO methods that you are using.

Keep it under 160 Characters: This is a fairly standard practice, but one that gets overlooked when placing these descriptions on multiple pages. By keeping it under 160 characters, your potential customers will get to read the full description as opposed to seeing the dreaded “…” which usually occurs before an important word or phrase appears. You want to maximize your description, so if it is well under 160 characters, then you will want to add or even rewrite it to include the right number.

Use One Target Keyword or Key Phrase: A single mention of the target keyword or key phrase can help reinforce your SEO strategy assuming you have not gone overboard with using the same keyword throughout the page. If you’ve done everything right, one more mention of the keyword in the meta description should be fine and help reinforce your SEO efforts.

The presence of meta descriptions can play a very important role in the click through rate (CTR) of your website, bringing in more potential customers and capturing the attention of those who see the description as well. This is especially true if your competitors have not fully utilized the power of meta descriptions on their websites.

Headlines

The headline of each page is one of the most important areas to place keyword-rich text along with attractive language that pulls in your potential customer. There are a number of ways you can use headlines to add to your SEO efforts in pulling in greater web traffic.

Use headlines on each page: It’s one of those aspects that get forgotten too often. If not the headline, then at least a good headline with the appropriate keyword that helps pull more people to the page. You may want to review your other pages to see if the headlines you have are appropriate. In fact, revitalizing your headlines on pages that are not doing too well may help bring in new potential customers.

Add <h2> and headline tags containing your keywords: This little trick adds more weight on these words for search engines to find. In addition, your readers will be helped as well since this little trick guides them through your content more easily. Remember that it’s not just about getting people to your website, its enticing them with good, readable content that keeps them there.

Headlines should be similar in a sense to what newspapers have done for decades, summarize the essence of the story in a few, attention-grabbing words. Your headlines do not need to be over-dramatic, but they do need to reach out and grab the attention of visitors to your website. This old-fashioned approach is actually quite effective as many people are used to seeing good, solid headlines and will actually appreciate their use on your website.