Once I developed my Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for Prop-Man.ca, the next step was to create awareness of the site by generating
traffic. Paid advertisements is the quickest way to do so, but I want to minimize costs as much as possible and want organic traffic
first so that I can better identify user flow once users are on my site and figure out what content converts best to paying
customers.
When utilizing Search Engine Optimization techniques it is important to keep a long term perspective. Results will not be seen
overnight, but over time, the effort involved in these techniques will pay off. Implementing foundational SEO techniques generates
traffic to your site long-term without having to continually incur advertising costs.
There is a lot of research done to try to understand how the google algorithm works, but at the end of the day, googles goal is to
make quality content easy to find. So simply put - the higher the quality of your sites content, the higher your site will rank on
google.
The first couple steps are to optimize your current site. This optimization includes making the content user friendly and readable
for search engine bots.
Step 1 for SEO is to identify the keywords that you want to rank for. Then write content that is relevant to that keyword. Think
of each page that you are developing as a story. Once the story is written you can then translate the different parts of the story
to the different sections of your page. Make sure to reference your target keywords frequently in your content to help with ranking.
The key to always remember is that it should be enjoyable to read by humans, so don't overdue it with keyword placement.
Step 2 is to ensure that the URL is human readable and related to your keywords. If your URL contains a phrase make sure to use
hyphens instead of spaces. If you are loading content dynamically, make sure to use keywords instead of parameterized queries based
on an ID in a database. The closer to the site, the higher the page will rank. The more sub page levels down that the URL is, the
less important google assumes that the content is to your site. Also, keep in mind the sub domains are considered as different sites
to google.
Step 3 is to incorporate meta data to provide google with a better understanding of your content as well as to provide input on how
your site appears in search results. This includes the title, keywords and meta description. Also, it is important to go to
schema.org to see which schemas are relevant for your site. Depending upon the type of content, having the schema data present
increases the odds of your site data appearing in rich snippets or rich cards on google. This gives users more information and
helps your particular result stand out in google.
Once your site is optimized, it is time to bring brand awareness from external sites.
Now that you have quality content and optimized your site using Search Engine Optimization best practices, the next thing to focus
on is link building. The more relevant sites that have links to your site, the more likely it is that your site is seen as being an
authority on the subject. The key here once again is quality - ensure that the backlinks are from reputable sites that share similar
content as your site. If it's beneficial to an end user, then it's beneficial to a search engine as well. Some common strategies
used for link building include reciprocal linking where you and another site agree to post links to each others sites. Be careful
with overdoing link sharing and only do so where the site that is linking to you has similar content. Again, only do wo where it
proves value to the end users. Creating guest posts on others blogs and on forums also helps to get the word out about your site.