Thursday, December 8, 2016

How to Improve Your Brand’s SEO

Wooden cubes placed on a keyboard spell out the acronym S-E-O for "search engine optimization"

Driving traffic to your website organically is important for any business that wants to expand its web presence without spending a large chunk of its budget on advertising.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of aligning your site’s content and design with best practices to improve its visibility in search results, and it can be a powerful technique for expanding your brand online.

If you’re eager to boost your site’s discoverability, these articles from the Hiring Headquarters—Upwork’s resource for businesses, freelancers, and entrepreneurs—will help you begin the process of improving your SEO and building a stronger flow of traffic to your website.

Avoid Issues with DIY SEO

For entrepreneurs who prefer a do-it-yourself approach, handling your own website’s SEO isn’t that difficult if you know best practices and are aware of the latest trends that can impact discoverability.

The trick is to keep up with the rapidly evolving landscape and ensure you’re doing everything correctly to get the best results from your efforts. Recent years have seen a lot of big changes in how SEO works, which is why it’s useful to know what to avoid so you can focus instead on what works.

10 Common SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid Them” looks at SEO practices that can hurt your ranking—where you show up in search results—and make it harder for customers and clients to find your business.

The article touches on what Google is looking for in high-quality sites and what users value most in terms of content and structure. It offers valuable insight into what to include on your site and what to avoid if you want to attract a higher traffic volume.

Based-on the extensive list of things to avoid, here are three tips the article suggests will improve your SEO.

1) Smooth navigation is critical. Making it easier for users to find your most important content will help improve your site’s browsing experience and increase its discoverability. It’s a good idea to keep your best content within two to three clicks of your homepage and avoid overly complex navigation menus.

2) Regularly create fresh content. High-quality content alone isn’t always enough. Search engines often prefer sites that are updated frequently over static sites that don’t refresh content often.

3) Steer clear of “black hat” tactics. Using underhanded methods—such stealing content, keyword stuffing, and duplicating a lot of low-quality content to temporarily boost your SEO—is bound to backfire, which can cause your site to be de-indexed from Google.

Hire an SEO Expert

Not everyone has the time or patience to manually manage their company’s website on an ongoing basis. When you’re keen to increase traffic but can’t spare the time needed to do it properly, bringing in an outside SEO expert can be a great solution.

What’s the best way to find top talent, and how do you know what qualities will help deliver the results you’re looking for?

SEO Job Description: What to Look for in an SEO Expert” answers many of the questions you might have when it comes to attracting the best SEO talent for enhancing your website. The article offers tips for writing a targeted project description for an SEO pro, and even includes a sample description to use as a guideline to write your own.

The article also goes beyond this to explore other useful insights, including different areas of specialization, common SEO-centric skill sets, and descriptions of what SEO experts actually do.

Here’s a short list of some of the key traits to look for in an SEO expert:

  • An extensive understanding of target customers within your industry and how to appeal to them
  • Good knowledge of how (and where) to use keywords properly throughout your content
  • Ability to craft strong, authoritative content that’s still easily digestible
  • Knowledge of how to build quality backlinks using accepted “white hat” methods

Looking for more hiring tips to expand your brand online? Head over to the Hiring Headquarters for more insights and insider articles to help you out!

The post How to Improve Your Brand’s SEO appeared first on Upwork Blog.



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