Tips to Build an Effective SEO Strategy on Low Budget

If you own an online business, your online marketing strategy is not complete without search engine optimization (SEO). This is irrespective of the size of the business. Without utilizing SEO on your website, it will be difficult for your business to benefit from organic traffic. As more and more people are taking their businesses online, it is becoming customary for a vast majority of people who can use the internet to do business online. Most of these people now use the internet to search and find information and even connect with others easily, no matter where they are on the globe. Search engines make these connections possible on the internet. When you type in a search query on Google for instance, it throws up results related to the keywords in your search query. SEO on your website is responsible for arranging and presenting relevant keywords that guide Google to rank the content on your website for the benefit of searchers. The higher Google ranks your website on its SERPs, the more organic traffic it sends to the website. So, if you’re doing business online, having your website ranked highly by Google means a lot as it guarantees the website huge organic traffic. Working to improve SEO on your business website can be a huge drain on your time and finances but it is worth the while in the long term. If however your business in very low on marketing budget, these here tips can help you to improve your website SEO.

Website On-Page Optimization

The content on your website is a major marketing element for any online business. Therefore, if you want to get the best results from your own website content, be sure the content is properly optimized. SEO is the technique that lets search engines easily read and understand what’s on the content and what it is about. If search engines understand what’s on your content, it helps them to easily index and rank the content on their SERPs. As a business owner, if search engines rank your website over and above your competition, it puts your business in a clear advantage to receive more organic traffic from search engines. A good on-page optimization helps to give your business that vital advantage. On-page optimization involves adding key elements such as meta descriptions and alternative text and using the right keywords on your content. These help the content to be discovered easily and ranked higher in the SERPs of search engines. Granted SEO is a bit technical in nature, so if you don’t have the technical knowledge, you can consider hiring a professional SEO expert to help improve SEO on your business website. It is worth the while in the long term.

High Quality Content

Your website content is a very essential part of SEO. The higher the quality of the content the better for the website’s SEO. Without high quality content, you cannot effectively do content marketing on your website.  This is because high quality content is liked more and shared more by users in different online communities. Most people like value, the reason they relate more with content that has value to them directly or indirectly. So, if you want your site to gain more authority, you must invest in quality to consistently create unique and useful content for its users. You can package unique quality content in form of videos and photos/images to make your website really attractive to users. Such content if really attractive can make your website visitors to stay longer on your site and possibly do business with you.
 
Diligent Keywords Research

There’s really no need to be an SEO expert or hire one when it comes to small businesses. Instead, learn the basic and key points that you need to know. For instance, doing proper keyword research can help your website rank higher and boost traffic as you can target specific keywords with high search volume. You can use Google Trends to check which keywords are popular at any moment. The tool also gives you a prediction of whether the keyword may be relevant in the future. A diligent research on long and short-tail keywords and phrases will help you to know exactly which keywords can directly benefit your business and give it some measure of advantage over competitors.

Social Media Engagement/Following

One other great way to improve SEO on your website is to ensure the accounts you have are on the most popular social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. These accounts should have a large audience/following. If you have a large audience/following on these platforms, many more people will visit your profile as a result. What they see there helps them to get better engaged with your profile more regularly. This engagement gives very positive online value to your business. If you deliberately build large audiences/following over your social media sites, you are likely to get natural backlinks to your business website. Google loves backlinks and relies on them as essential elements to rank your website.

Website Loading Speed

The user-friendliness of your website is helpful for its SEO. The loading speed of your website is one of the essential elements of the website that makes it user-friendly. Fast-loading sites gain more authenticity because they clearly show that the website owner really cares for visitors’ time and convenience. The average internet user is notoriously always in a hurry. You risk losing good business if your website is too slow to open. Impatient website users can quickly move to your competitors if they find your website too slow to open. When users wait too long before your site opens, they might get impatient with your site and quickly move on without even bothering to read the content on the website. If your website is slow to open, Google’s search algorithm takes note and it affects your ranking on Google SERPs.

Get On Social Media

Most brands now use social media not only to engage their customers better but also for marketing purposes. It costs you practically nothing to get your business on social media since most social media accounts are free. Therefore, having your business on some of the most popular social media sites is good for your SEO. This is because doing so helps to make your site visible to audiences who are already active on the internet and even to those who are not yet online or have no idea what SEO is about. Therefore, having your business on social media can help your business with a higher chance of reaching out to more potential customers. That gives the business more business opportunities and better ROI.

Carefully Build Backlinks

Google always takes backlinks into account when ranking websites. If such backlinks are coming from a reputable site, so much the better for your ranking. Numerically, the more quality backlinks you have, the higher your chances of ranking better on Google. A backlink coming from a reputable site is something that Google loves to see. Such backlinks automatically boost your ranking because Google really trusts other sites making their opinions about your website positive. Quality backlinks pointing to your website help to give the website some advantage when competing with other businesses in the same business as yours. Technically, you can deliberately build backlinks manually but if you are unable to, you can then think of hiring professionals to help you out.

Last Line

Even if you run a small business online and at very low marketing budget, it is still feasible for you to take advantage of SEO strategy. Because of the huge advantage your business will derive from SEO, low funding is not sufficient to dissuade you from having the right SEO on your website. From the foregoing tips, you’ll discover that you can build an effective SEO on your website even with very low marketing budget. Once you are able to consistently craft high quality content and optimize it on-page, get the business on social media, build a huge following for the business together with high-quality backlinks, you are good to go. You can get all these done at very low cost and still have a good SEO strategy on your website.

5 Simple Ways to Enhance Your Domain Authority

No good internet marketer can afford to ignore the Domain Authority, DA, of their websites. Even though Domain Authority may not have direct effect on the SERP ranking of any website, it somehow helps to provide some insights which help to improve SEO efforts that directly impact on the ranking. There are web tools you can use to measure the DA of your website. Your website DA could be high or low depending on the efforts you are putting in to enhance its performance. What you should immediately suspect when your site has a low DA score is that it has serious issues like spam backlinks and keyword stuffing which are harmful to the site. Next is to take conscious and deliberate simple steps all aimed at restoring the site DA which will in turn impact your site SERP ranking. By knowing all the factors that influence the ranking metrics of your website, you can take steps to have any problems fixed immediately by way of preventive measures to prevent the DA score from further dipping. Here are 5 simple things you can do.


 
#1. Choose the Right Domain Name

This is a given if you want to make any impact at all in internet marketing. If you don’t have a domain name yet, it’s time to get one. A great domain name is good for branding and SEO, the reason it must be carefully chosen to help promote your brand. It contributes immensely to enhance the credibility and trustworthiness of your website. These in turn help to make possible higher Click Through Rates, CTR, and consequently the conversion rates of the site. They impact positively on your SERP ranking and Domain Authority. Because you need a good domain for easy identity of your brand and easily recognizable, it is best to settle for a domain name that is short, catchy and relevant to your site niche and business identity. Marketing experts advise that the name should be devoid of symbols and uncommon spellings and syllables as these do harm a domain’s readability and memorability.

#2. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Right now, the whole world is on the move. People are doing business and marketing products on the go. Thanks to hand-held smart devices which have become extremely very popular worldwide. With over 4 billion unique users accessing the web through mobile devices, it is one huge market any serious marketer cannot afford to do without. You can easily get left out of that huge market if you are unable to optimize your website to make it mobile friendly. If you are a marketer and you cannot optimize your website for mobile users, you hugely risk losing about half of your web traffic. That no doubt will negatively affect your DA score. A responsive web design with the appropriate apps can help make your website mobile friendly.

#3. Always Optimize Your Content

The way content is treated on your website is one of the most important factors that affect the DA score of your website. Apart from helping your brand to build a solid and formidable audience base, quality content is also a delight for Search Engines. Quality content best appeals to Search Engines’ algorithms that prioritize websites with valuable information. That makes it imperative for you to continually optimize your content for better results. Web masters can help you do this for a small fee. If however you have the knowhow yourself, you can routinely incorporate niche-based keywords, customized meta descriptions while adding internal linking in your content. Doing so helps to increase the Click Through Rates, CTR, on the site while greatly decreasing the bounce rates.

#4. Produce only High Quality Content
 
For online marketing, content is king. Your content must be designed for persons and not search engines. That is why you must make sure to always produce unique and informative quality content on your website which attracts visitors and keeps them long enough on your site to notice the brand you are marketing. Creating a linkable high-quality content can also help you to gain high-authority links pointing to your site. High-authority links with characteristic high DA scores and SERP rankings means such websites already have well established authority and trust with search engines. By associating your site with such high authority websites, search engines are likely to deem yours just as reputable and trustworthy as well. By adding external links from high authority sites, it encourages such linked sites to visit yours mostly out of curiosity. Your website gains immensely when such sites link back to you if they like your content. That way, you can eventually build a great and beneficial network within your niche. That helps to enhance your website DA and your brand.

#5. Regularly Edit and Remove Bad and Spammy Links

Most Search Engines particularly Google are highly intolerant of spammy links. Regular algorithms deployed by Google easily detect spammy links and links stuffing and they punish such websites very severely. That is why expert marketers always advise that it is best to avoid linking your website to low-authority and shady websites. With the use of reliable Web spam score tools, you can regularly review and edit your content to remove bad and spammy links. That helps to improve the good health of your website, its DA score, Spam score and the overall reputation of your website.

Essential Tips to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer

These days, one of the most popular ways for marketers to earn money online is by way of affiliate marketing.  If well established, it can easily become a very reliable passive income source. If you are desirable to get involved in affiliate marketing, all you need do is to reach out and become a partner with any business of your choice whose products/services you’ll like to help market. Preferred choices for marketers are mostly ecommerce websites. When you link up with your preferred ecommerce website, you can then start referring your blog readers and visitors from your website to any of their products/services. By doing so, Product Merchants arrange to pay you a commission by way of pre-determined percentages if an individual uses your affiliate link to visit the ecommerce site to make a purchase.

It is recommended you really understand these here tips before you decide to join any affiliate program. They will help you to take the best possible decision about the most suitable affiliate program to help you succeed as an affiliate marketer. To enhance that, you’ll do best to keep a close eye on your website’s analytics and SERP’s because of regular policy changes by major Search Engines.


 
Here are some time-tested business tips to help you become a successful affiliate marketer.

#1. Select the Right Niche

A product/service niche stands distinct from others because of its unique style, profession, lifestyle, culture, behaviour or geographic need. If you get your niche selection right, it allows you to appear as an authority on products connected to that niche. That authority deeply resonates with a distinct group of customers interested in that niche. It allows you to build a strong connection with an ideal audience of potential customers.

#2. Use Only the Right Content

Blogging is all about content marketing. Good content remains key if you want your blog to be successful. Without good content, you can also not succeed in affiliate marketing. Content is considered good when it is educative and informative enough to attract readers. If it is relevant to the needs of your audience, that is when the audience will be sufficiently interested in it to want to follow your affiliate link to the product/service site. It is only when that happens a sale is likely to take place warranting the payment of commissions to the marketer.

#3. Be Authentic

Buying decisions are easily taken when buyers have cause to believe in the authenticity of their sources. That is why buyers always look out for and rely hugely on the recommendation of an authentic source before buying a product they are not too familiar with. Being authentic therefore always counts heavily in favour of influence marketers. Smart marketers build authenticity and authority by creating content around products they know and have actually used in the past. That makes it easy for them to convince others to try the product as well.

#4. Manage Timing Well

Affiliate marketing because of the diversity of the world and the uniqueness of the internet is a 24/7, 365 days a year business if you really want to succeed in it. For that reason, if you are not online, be sure some automated strategies like AI and auto-responders are helping you out to get things going. That is the only way you can hope to work all the time in reality. With good web analytics tools, you can find out what times of the day/nite and in which parts of the world your visitors and sales are coming from. For that reason, the better you manage your timing, the more sales you make. 


 
#5. Stay Up to Date

This is a given. With rapid changes in technology and the internet, if you are unable to stay up to date, you quickly get left behind. For instance, to stay on top of SERP, you must endeavour to keep a close eye on any changes in policy or in the algorithms of major Search Engines like Google. Your business can get hurt on the internet real bad and pretty quickly if you are negligent about keeping an eye on changes impacting directly on the SEO of your business website.

#6. Learn to Use Tracking

If you are in content marketing, you must learn how to track, collect, analyse and use data to your business advantage. The more and better data you can gather about your website, the better and easier for you to keep giving your audience the right content. If you have your business on social media, it is easy for you to use social media tracking and analytics to gain a very significant understanding of the behaviour and demographics of your audience. That information is very vital to determine the right content to produce for your audience.  It also allows you to know which of your marketing strategies works well and which social media channels are best suited for your type of product and promotion.

#7. Make Things Easy

Keeping it strictly simple and easy is always a good marketing advice. The reason most people like to shop online these days is because of its relative convenience. That is why you must ensure your website is well designed and user-friendly to attract more visitors, leads and sales. If for instance your audience routinely encounters avoidable difficulties in interacting with your website particularly opening your affiliate links, chances are, you’ll be losing a great deal on conversions and sales.

#8. Avoid Overpitching

Yeah, nearly everyone out there on the internet wants to sell but not everyone wants to buy. Many online surfers are at times just having fun and not interested in buying anything. As a marketer, it must be your content first before any product you are selling. When you get people to be interested in your content, it is possible to lure them to buy, but if all you are doing is just pushing affiliate links without good content, you are overpitching. That sends negative signals to potential buyers and your sales efforts may be stagnating as a result. You must endeavour to have a balance in your content which not only positively highlights the product but manages as well to keep your audience interested in what you have to say. If you habitually put all your focus in highlighting the product that you are marketing, chances are, you will frustrate your audience and they may stop following you on your affiliate marketing programs. To avoid overpitching, your focus must remain on producing useful and informative content related to the product/service you are marketing. That helps faster in arresting the attention of your audience to want to make some purchases without being necessarily “harassed” into doing so.


 

Tips for Writing SEO-Compliant Content

As every online marketer very well knows, targeted traffic is very crucial to succeeding in affiliate marketing. The more targeted traffic you can drive to your website, the more the sales you can make. Therefore, your first duty as a marketer is to explore credible ways to build traffic to your affiliate marketing website. You can’t get organic traffic if important Search Engines like Google are unable to locate your website easily then rank it for searches. That is what is technically called SEO, Search Engine Optimization and it usually takes some techniques to get it right. Part of those techniques is to have a good placement for your website on Google SERP pages. If you do that correctly, you will attract more visits, which is good for affiliate marketing, especially if it is targeted. SEO is a very important success factor in affiliate marketing and it all starts with the content. By using these tips, they can help you to go a long way to create content that is search engine friendly.


 
Here are some of the techniques you need to get your content ranking high on SEO.

Choose Your Keywords Correctly: First you must decide on your keywords depending on the niche business you have settled for. This is where keyword research comes in. This you can do by using Google web technology tools to find keywords relevant to your affiliate marketing niche. Before writing a content, you should always have your chosen keywords in mind because every post must contain one or more of your chosen keywords for effects.

Target One Keyword at a time: You can’t afford to be aimless with your content creation. For that reason, every piece of content you create should have a clear purpose with a keyword as its unique identity. For best results, each article or piece of content should target one main keyword even if with some expertise, you may choose to add a few secondary keywords which help to capture clusters of long tail keywords related to your main keyword.

Use the chosen Keyword in Important parts of the Content: What counts here is to try to add the keyword in the right places on the content. Experts recommend that you place your keyword most preferably in the title, in the first paragraph, in the last paragraph, and in between. Adequate care must however be taken not to stuff your content with keywords as Search Engines like Google are now smart enough to detect such gimmick. If they do, they could penalize you severely for it. It pays to also include keywords in the alt-text of images.

Use Hierarchy in your Content: If you want to make your content easy to find by visitors, you must use hierarchy in it. This involves the use of Headers and Sub-Headers to show relationships between the different sections of your content. When visitors find it relatively easy to find and navigate your content, it makes them happier. The happier your site visitors are with your content, the more likely they are to stick around to view and hopefully click on your affiliate promotions. Search Engines too also love Headers because Headers provide them useful clues which help the Search Engines to better understand what your content is all about.

Build Internal and External Links: Link building is important because, the number, quality, and relevance of links pointing to any content is an important ranking factor used by foremost Search Engines like Google. Therefore, when writing a new content, you must endeavor to find older content that is relevant to your current content and add links pointing at them. It is not smart to just embark only on promoting your affiliate marketing links. Using appropriate links also helps to promote your older content. Once you complete any article, it helps to also link to it from some of your older content making sure you use the main keyword in the anchor text of the internal link.