If you have a business with a web site, you probably spend a lot of time thinking about ways to drive traffic to it. You have probably heard about search engine optimization (SEO). Companies like Outbrain list being found that being discovered by a search engine is the number one way to drive traffic to your site. Nearly 94% of al internet experiences are started with a search engine search and at least 75% of all people do not look past the first page of their search results. Making sure your site pops up on those first pages is crucial. Knowing all of this may make you want to learn the SEO trade. Here are some ways to do just that.

6 Tips to Help You Learn the SEO Trade:

1. Start by finding out where your site ranks today. The first thing you may want to do is try a few searches of your own. Go to Google and search for yourself, then try to look for some of the terms that describe your business or your products. Are you a landscaper, for example? Look up landscapers in your area and make a note of where your page pops up in your results. There are also online tools you can use to see where you stand before you start to make any changes.
2. Learn to use keywords, they are your best friends. In real estate the phrase is “location, location, location” but in SEO, it is “keywords, keywords, keywords.” Be strategic using keywords, do some research into which ones apply to you and how you would search for your goods or services if you were looking for them. Place the right keywords in your text, titles of posts and the URLs. This is all searchable and will help you drive traffic.
3. Put in links to your own content. Include links to appropriate content elsewhere on your site. Do not go overboard with your links. If you put in too many, it will become really annoying to your visitors and you will look like you are spamming. This is a very basic step when you want to learn SEO. If you are drafting a post about refinancing your home, you may have written in the past about parts of that. Link to those articles in your new post. Just remember to make it all relevant to your new content.
4. Does your page have a sitemap? This will make it easier for search engines to map and find your sites. They use tools, known as spiders to crawl through the web and find websites with certain keywords. Your site will pop up more often and be higher in the search results if you have a sitemap. This is one of the Google tips that most white label SEO companies will tell you about.
5. Make sure your URLs are easy for search engines to find. One of the most basic things to help you learn the SEO trade is to make sure your URL is easy to find with the right keywords. One way to think about it is to look at your URL by itself. Would someone know what you are selling by the URL? If the answer is yes, great! If it is no, look into ways to fix that. Also when you write your posts’ titles, ask the same question.
6. Words matter but images do not. You want to have images on your site to make it visually appealing but they do nothing for your SEO. Neither does anything that uses Flash. The good thing is that you can still have those things on your site and increase your SEO rating. How? Describe your images and Flash items. Search engines cannot search items without words but you can add your search terms to the descriptions of your photos and videos.

Better SEO has become the “holy grail” of web design. Unlike the mythical cup, you can find ways to improve your SEO and use it to drive traffic to your website. It may not be possible to find the holy grail but it is very possible to learn the SEO trade. Try these tips and watch your traffic numbers grow.