A definitive guide to Digital Marketing
for Small Businesses & Startups

“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.”
–Wendy Piersall.

3 things to make your website SEO friendly

1. High quality content

The content must focus on solving the readers problem and should be actionable so that the reader can get some key tasks accomplished in a systematic manner.

By solving the customer problem, your content will enable you to establish authority around the topic that you are writing about.

The content must be written using your target keywords including your long tail keywords.

For example, if your article has the title “10 benefits of using turmeric in cooking”, the body of your article should mention the benefits of using turmeric and perhaps recipes of some delicious yet simple food that can be infused with turmeric. The reader, in this case, can make a turmeric latte using the expresso machine at home within minutes.

Additionally, your content should use proper citations and links to relevant research to give your content more credibility. If those other sites find you linking them and choose to link you back, you get a boost to your blog's authority since the credible source is backlinking you.

Lastly, the content must be original. Copying some article from the web and changing a couple of words here and there will alert crawlers of duplicate content and in turn will hurt your ranking and authority. It can also be very bad for your reputation.

2. High frequency, fresh content

You may write a fantastic blog but then may not publish anything for weeks or months. In this case, you won't get any results. You will have to write consistently on a weekly basis to continue to build authority on topics that are interesting to your customers and your business. Consistently publishing high quality, relevant, actionable and SEO friendly content would eventually help in ranking your website towards the top of the search results.

If you post on a certain day of the week regularly for 4-5 weeks, the crawlers consider your website as constantly updated and active. This would increase your chances of coming up in the top results of search engines significantly since the search engines want to showcase fresh, updated and high quality content to the readers.

3. SEO friendly structure

The SEO friendly structure makes it easy for the search engine crawlers to find, access and make sense of your content. A proper SEO friendly structure of a blog would consist of the following items:

1. Title/Heading: The title/heading of your blog should have the topic and the keywords you are targeting for the blog. The title of your blog should use the H1 tag.


2. Sub-topics/headings: The sub-topic headings in your blogs should use H2 tags so that the important topics are recognized by the search engines.
   
   Understand that the H1 and H2 tags are informing the search engines and website visitors about important topics and sub-topics of your blog. These tags should be used only in heading and sub- headings to make the job of the search engines and readers easy.


3. Bullet points, snippets: A blog must look pleasing to the eyes of the reader. There should be less clutter and more white space. Instead of writing a long paragraph that highlights 5 key elements of a sub-topic, making them as 5 bullet points will make them more recognizable to the search engines and will make them more readable for your readers.
   
   You can use the H3 tags for the bullet points to highlight the importance. To help highlight important points, H3 tag, bullet points and making some phrases bold is great idea.
   
   Additionally, more white space on the page is better for readability. Your paragraphs should be short – 2 to 3 lines so that the reader can quickly glance.


4. Meta description: Meta description should ideally consist of a brief summary of your page. In essence, you are telling what (benefits) the reader will get out of this blog if they read it. The more relevant your meta description is to the topic and the content of the blog, the more chances you have of getting a higher ranking on the search engine. You must make sure your long-tail keywords (topic) and the primary keyword you are targeting are included in the meta description.


5. Relevant and appropriate use of keywords: Your article should contain relevant primary keywords and long tail keywords (which is your topic). These primary keywords should be aligned with the topic of your article. For each blog, you should target only one or two primary keywords for better discoverability and focus.


6. Keyword density: Don't stuff the article/blog with keywords or overuse them. As per the SEO experts, the ideal usage of a keyword in an article should be 1-2% of the number of total words of your article. This means that there must be only 1-2 keywords in every 100 words of your article. Search engines would penalize you for stuffing the keywords. If you have to use keywords at a higher frequency, then use a combination of the target keywords and their synonyms to avoid keyword stuffing.


7. Call to actions (CTA): There can be multiple call to actions in your blogs. The most popular ones are 'Buy now', or 'Download now'. These call to actions should be made available to the users at appropriate places in the blogs.
   
   As a best practice, near the banner image of your blog (top section of your blog) is a great place to offer a CTA to download an eBook or a guide.
   
   Once you have introduced the topic and got the user hooked, your next CTA could be more subtle (after first 1 or 2 paragraphs) which could just be a hyperlink to the blog text.
   
   Lastly, towards the end of the blog, you should have a prominent CTA with a proper banner image.
   
   For example, if you are talking about using headphones to listen to a certain style of music, the link to buy the headphones should be provided in the same sentence. This CTA will encourage the reader to take action, fill a form, download an eBook or even make a purchase!
   
   You should avoid “Find more information here” or “Click here” type of CTAs. Adding hyperlinks to the text within the blog that is highlighting the blog topic and keyword is a much better alternative.


8. Videos, Banners, Images: Instead of long monotonous text, adding videos, banners and images in the blog will keep your readers engaged and lower your bounce rate substantially.
   
   For certain topics, Google tends to show videos near the top of the page 1. That gives an opportunity for you to improve the ranking of your blogs.
   
   Additionally, having images and videos will provide you with an opportunity to add Alt text which is great for SEO.
   
   For example, if the reader is specifically looking for “how to assemble a floor lamp” on a search engine, then the search engine is more likely to show the videos and photo based instructive blogs ahead of purely text based articles.


9. Alt text: Alt text is the small description like a caption written for images in your blog. This text becomes very important to make sense of the image when the user cannot see the image for some reason.
   
   A well descriptive short alt text is important for the website's accessibility and SEO. The alt text should capture the essence of the topic of the blog and also should have the primary keywords you are targeting.
   
   As an example, Neil Patel has done a fabulous job when it comes to using SEO to promote his agency. He ranks number one for multiple SEO based articles and blogs. Let's dive deeper into one of Neil Patel's SEO blog.

As an example, Neil Patel has done a fabulous job when it comes to using SEO to promote his agency. He ranks number one for multiple SEO based articles and blogs. Let's dive deeper into one of Neil Patel's SEO blog.

What does Neil Patel do right in this blog?

• The blog uses proper H1 tag in the title.
• The blog uses H2 tag for subtopics and H3 to highlight points in the subtopic.
• The blog has a video in the initial 2 scrolls to explain certain fundamentals about the key topic of the blog.
• The blog offers a CTA several times in the entire blog – Once at the beginning, once in the middle and lastly at the end of the blog.
• The blog uses multiple internal links that redirect the readers to another blog on the same website.
• The blog has very relevant pictures that demonstrate what the writer wants to communicate.
• All the pictures have appropriate Alt Text that describe what the pictures are to improve SEO.
• The blog has multiple keywords and long tail keywords used to improve the SEO.

In a nutshell, if your blog helps solve a problem for the reader, provides SEO friendly structure which makes it more easy to be found by the search engines, is easy to read and if you do that consistently for over 6 months, you will start seeing growth in organic traffic to your website.

To gain an in-depth understanding of the process of making your website SEO friendly, you can read Small Business SEO: 7 Steps to Drive Organic Traffic.