Good SEO will earn you great Internet real estate

SEO = "Search Engine Optimization"

Growing up, my sisters and I would frequently play Monopoly, and to this day, it's essentially the only board game that truly holds my interest. I love playing it. I particularly enjoy when I'm able to convince my father, my kids, and my siblings to play with me. The games take forever, but it truly is a lot of fun to attempt to gain control of the board.

One of the secrets to winning that game is to acquire as many properties as possible, however you can. Then you develop those properties by building houses and hotels while collecting rent from other players every time they land on your square. Most of the hard work is done early in the game, but if you're aggressive then, you'll be richly rewarded later.

I think developing an SEO (search engine optimization) strategy for your online content works in a similar way. If you're smart about how you build your website, blog, and landing pages early on, you can benefit from great SEO for many years. You'll end up gaining an edge online for certain terms and search results. It's like owning property online that people keep landing on and paying rent.

Recently, my daughter asked me to explain how I'm driving traffic to my websites. I told her that there are several things I'm doing, but one of the most important tasks is making sure I'm optimizing each page's SEO. To be honest, once you understand what that means, it's really easy to do, and it will keep people coming back to your site over and over. Your site will become one of the easiest places for them to discover on the web, and that can help you share your content and make sales essentially on auto-pilot.

If this sounds appealing to you, let me quickly share 8 tips that can help you improve your site's SEO. All of these tips are easy. The hardest part is knowing that they're necessary, which most people apparently don't.

8 Tips that will help you get better SEO

1. Update content regularly - Goals that actually make it to your calendar are goals that actually get accomplished. I have a content creation schedule that helps keep me accountable to creating new blog posts and other forms of content each week. It's my goal to create one new blog post per week, and keeping to that rhythm indicates to search engines that my site is active. This improves its rank in search results.

2. Use keywords - There are certain words or phrases people are searching for when they're looking for the kind of content you create. Use those words and phrases regularly in your blog posts and in other areas of your website. That will make your site much easier to discover.

3. Create searchable titles - The titles you use for blog posts and other pages are very important. When you're creating them, don't be overly fancy. Just try to think like a person who is sitting down in front of a computer trying to search for something. What are they likely to type into that search bar? Most likely, they're going to type something like, "How do I get my dog to stop barking?" If you have an article on your site about that topic, I suggest you use a title that closely mirrors what someone will actually be typing in the search field instead of getting too artistic and giving your post a non-discoverable title like, "When Rover lost his voice." No one is searching for those terms, and your creative title will make your content harder to discover. Be boring sometimes because boring can be helpful.

4. Don't duplicate content on your site - Some people try to game the SEO system by duplicating content on their website in the hopes that duplication will make the site more discoverable. That doesn't usually work. In fact, it can cause your site to be penalized by some search engines. Keep your pages unique. Don't post the same things twenty times thinking you're going to trick Google. You won't.

5. Add your main word to your title tag - This point is something you may have assumed already based on my previous suggestions, but when possible, add the main keyword of your post to your title tag. If the post is about gourmet coffee, make sure the words "gourmet coffee" show up in your title. Call the post something like, "The best gourmet coffee brands to buy if you're on a budget," not "What I'm sippin' when my wallet is empty."

6. Add keywords to your page settings - Depending on where you're hosting your website, you may have access to page settings. If you do, take five seconds to add some keywords to those page settings.

7. Give images SEO-friendly names - Naming the images on your site is an often overlooked SEO tactic. Rename some of your pictures to reflect appropriate keywords that fit with that picture. If your site has images of cars, don't leave the image name IMG2526. Rename it to something like, "2022 Toyota Camry." Search engines will pick up on that and drive additional traffic to your site if you do this.

8. Use backlinks and inter-page links - Page linking demonstrates authority to search engines. If other sites are sharing links to your site, that improves SEO. That will probably happen over time as you continue to write helpful blog posts and other good content that people share, but there's something you can do to speed up the process of developing this kind of online authority. Start linking to some of your other pages. Create links to your other content within your posts. This can give your site and SEO boost early on while you wait for your other page links to get shared organically.

Give these suggestions a try if you're trying to improve the discoverability of your website. If you consistently apply these concepts, I'm certain you'll see your traffic gradually improve along with your page rank in search results.

-John