People are often amazed at how www.motherswhowork.co.uk manages to get the amount of traffic it does without any paid for advertising.
One of its strengths is good quality content – but the main strength is search engine optimisation (SEO).
SEO can be a nit of a mystery to new online business mums, but it can be done without knowing a line of code, and with little effort.
SEO is about getting higher rankings in search enine results (i.e. on the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing, plus other smaller search engines).Using just a few techniques, you’ll start to reap the rewards.
There are five things you need to do in order to get better search engine rankings – and you can achieve this even if you are complete novice with websites:
1. Multiple backlinks
Create as many links back to your website as possible. In my post about page rank, I wrote about the importance of having people link back to your website – it’s also very important for SEO.
You need to find websites that will link to your website – or where you can post a link to your website yourself. One easy and free way of doing this is to create a Facebook fanpage or a Twitter profile for your business. Then every time you post an article or a blog, you make sure that it is posted on Facebook and Twitter.
You can also get a list of relevant blogs from the Google Blogs Directory, and contact a few blogs to see if you can do a link exchange.
If you run a business, or work as a freelance or a consultant in your field, make sure you add your business to our Mumpreneur Directory – it is free, so there’s no excuse. Apart from being a great way to get a backlink, it will also give you the opportunity to advertise your business to our 85,000-plus monthly visitors.
2. Frequency of content is important for SEO
Google loves it when websites update their content regulalrly. If you find it hard to find content to write about, then try breaking down your blogs or articles, try creating videos or audio recordings – it’s funny how once the microphone is on, we can find something to say!
You should update your website’s blog ro news section at least once a week. In the Mothers Who Work Club video tutorials, there are video tutorials on how and where to find relevant subjects to write about on your blog – if writer’s block is your main problem, then it’s worth the investment!
3.Web page structure
How you structure your web pages is very important. If a search engine is visiting you, it won’t spend an hour online. It will be done in a matter of seconds, so you really ought to see how far you can go with this.
Ensure you have proper meta titles, using your H1 and H2 tags effectively, and of course, anchor text within your site. Make sure you have links back to your own web pages – a good way to do this is to have a relevant post link.
4. Keywords
Remember – you are always optimising for keywords, so they must appear on your page so that search engines can find you.
Here are the three things you must do with keywords:
- First, make regular attempts to create backlinks (not reciprocal links) with other sites. Leave genuine comments on blogs, post into classified directories, submit your articles to various sites, whatever it takes. Do this as regularly as possible.
- Second, ensure you have solid content. People will want to link to you because your content is good. So I recommend that you either write your own or pay someone to write it for you at one of the freelancer sites like www.elance.com or www.peopleperhour.com.
- Third, maintain consistency in what you do. One post a day for 100 days is very different from 100 posts a day on your website. And in any case the latter is bad for your website because search engines treat that as as spamming.
5. Use your images
This is one area that a lot of people don’t know about or don’t realise the importance of. If you are in the habit of uploading images to your website with obscure filesnames like DSC098746343746.jpg, then you are missing out! If you are uploading a picture of a dog to your dog training website or blog, you should call the image dog.jpg, or god.gif (the format the image is in does not matter).
It amazes me still how much traffic we get on Motherswhowork.co.uk because of the optimised images we hold on the website – and you will be too if you start to label your images correctly!
SEO doesn’t take forever, but it requires a bit of patience. You may not start to see the results immediately, but give it a a few weeks and once Google and other search engines start to notice your efforts, it will start paying off.
