As an author or business owner, it’s important to have a strong online presence that enables your website to grow its traffic—uniting readers (and potential clients) with your product. Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies can be daunting, but they are essential as one of the ways to gain a readership. How will you sell books or services if no one is able to find you on Google?

Keeping these simple tips in mind when you post blogs or design your website can prime your business for success, and enable an easier (and more affordable) transition if you decide to hire professionals to make your website more SEO-friendly: continue on reading to know more.

1. Keywords and a Descriptive Domain Name

This is one of the easiest ways to build page rank in search engines. Specific keywords, phrases and synonyms must have a strong presence in your blog/website so that engines know to recognize it. Take our website for instance; “Midnight Publishing” has a critical keyword in its domain name and throughout the site and blog: publishing. Google and other search engines immediately recognize it. There are various websites and software to assist you in finding SEO keywords, such as wordstream.com and the Google Keyword Finder (you need a free Adwords account to use it). It takes some time to find out which keywords have the right ratio for you—they should be less competitive, but still carry relevance for your readers—but it’s a necessary and useful foundation to build a blog or website around.

2. Linking to Other Pages Within Your Website and Outbound to Similar Sites

Another useful way to build SEO is by linking to pages within your website (this is called “internal linking”). When your homepage is connected to other pages within the website via hyperlink or title pages, this increases Google’s ability to find them (affectionately called “link juice” on moz.com’s Internal Links post). This is especially important when your domain name doesn’t include top keywords for your product—perhaps the domain is your name, but it doesn’t include “author” or “graphic designer” beforehand. There is also the seo audit service that businesses need.

It’s also very helpful to link to important, high-ranking sites in your category, and for them to link back to you—this increases your “PageRank,” the actual term created by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for relevance of websites in their search engines. So how do you achieve this? Read on …

3. Updating Your Site Regularly With Useful and Relevant Content

Websites that are frequently updating with keyword-utilizing content are going to get a higher PageRank, but there’s a catch. Google changes its algorithms regularly to deter users from “keyword-stuffing” in frequent posts, or linking out to irrelevant affiliate pages. Search engines (and other, better-known blogs that might link to your site) reward high-quality content meant to enhance the consumer’s experience. You must allow your blog or website to grow organically, which is also known as using the “white hat” method in SEO practices. It takes longer, but in the long run reaps more rewards.

“Black hat” methods are ones that cheat the system, and with Google’s extensive army of website patrollers, the last thing you want is to have your website flagged for unacceptable or spam-like SEO methods.

For many, this is when the hiring of a business writer from Midnight Publishing’s staff is especially useful. We provide curated, SEO-optimized content for your blog or website that’s tailored to your desired “voice”—never bland, always finding the perfect ratio between consumer experience, relevance and keyword/SEO tactics. Contact us about it today. (See what we did there? Internal linking!)

4. Utilize Google Analytics for Understanding Traffic

Google Analytics is a fantastic and free resource for monitoring how your website’s traffic is doing. With this program, you are able to see which pages in your website are receiving the most clicks (a great way to calculate how effective your SEO-optimized keywords are), as well as the median ages and genders for who is currently finding your website. This is a great way to monitor whether you’re reaching the target audience—or tweak it if not.

Read on for more tips for SEO beginners, and don’t forget to contact us for any and all of your publishing, writing and marketing needs!

References (see how we’re linking out to relevant pages?):

moz.com’s The Beginner’s Guide to SEO
Shaun Anderson’s SEO Tutorial for Beginners 2015
searchengineland.com’s The Most Powerful SEO Tactic: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify