How to use SEO techniques to Increase Website Visibility

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It starts with optimizing your website with keywords and phrases. You may already have a good idea which words people use to find your business but it’s important to keep an open mind and do your research. The results may surprise you. The Google Keyword tool can help you find the most popular words and phrases.
In short, SEO helps you find what you need on the web (Killoran, 2013).

Using SEO to Increase Visibility?
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SEO is a technical process, and as such, it impacts major technology choices. A CMS for example, can facilitate or, possibly, undermine your SEO strategy. Some platforms do not allow you to have titles and meta descriptions that vary from one web page to the next, create hundreds of pages of duplicate content, or make a 302, temporary, redirect the default redirect.
An important factor to understand is the nature of the market in which you are competing. This tells you how competitive the environment is in general, and augmented with additional research, which you can use to tell how competitive the SEO environment is.
Another method you can use to get a very quick read on competitiveness is using a keyword tool such as the Google Traffic Estimator to see what your cost per click would be.
A key factor is how many clicks from the home page it takes to reach a page. A page that is only one click from the home page is clearly important. A page that is five clicks away is not nearly as influential. In fact, the search engine spider may never even find such a page. In SEO it is important to keep the site architecture as flat as possible, to minimize clicks from the home page to important content. However, too many links on a page are not good for search engines either. The bottom line is that you need to plan out a site structure that is as flat as you can reasonably make it without compromising the user experience.
Establish a strong foundation, and you will help set yourself up for SEO success (Marketing Donut, 2015).
Keyword Research
Every search phrase that’s typed into an engine is recorded in one way or another, and keyword research tools allow you to retrieve this information. However, those tools cannot show you how valuable or important it might be to rank for and receive traffic from those searches. To understand the value of a keyword, you need to research further, make some hypotheses, test, and iterate, the classic web marketing formula.
Popular search terms usually comprise less than 30% of the overall searches performed on the Web. The remaining 70% lie in what’s commonly called the long tail of search (Enge, et.al. 2012).
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It is a good idea to target keywords that indicate imminent action, because searchers are more likely to perform the corresponding action on your site when they search for those terms than they are when they come to your site from different search terms. Your click-through/conversion rates are likely to be higher if you target keywords that indicate the intent behind the search. You can also test this by setting up a PPC campaign and buying clicks on a given keyword and seeing how it converts for you.
Pay attention to your site’s content and compare it to what other sites in the top results are offering. You can also use an analytic program to check which of your pages have the highest abandonment rates. See what you can change on those pages to improve the user experience and increase users’ level of enjoyment when using your site.
Keyword research is a complex and time-consuming task, but the rewards are high. Once you learn where the keyword search volume is, you can begin to think about how that affects the information architecture and the navigation structure of your site (Imperial College London, 2016).
Conclusion
SEO and Keyword Research are vital parts to increase the visibility of your website, they are time consuming but have high rewards for when it is done. It is something that can help any business that need to increase traffic on their sites, from small businesses to large, SEO is very important and should be undertaken by all.
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Sources
Enge, E, Spencer, S, Stricchiola, J and Fishkin, R (2012). The Art of SEO. 2nd ed. United States of America: O´Reilly Media inc. p25-160.
Killoran, J. (2013). How to Use Search Engine Optimization Techniques to Increase Website Visibility. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. 56 (1), p1-4.
Imperial College London. (2016). Increasing the visibility of your website. Available: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/staff/tools-and-reference/web-guide/training-and-events/materials/seo/. Last accessed 29th January 2016.
The Marketing Donut. (2015). Online Marketing. Available: http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing/online-marketing/seo. Last accessed 29th January 2016.