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Welcome to Markethive

SEO can be confusing for new site owners However Markethive can make it a whole lot easier for those who only have time to sell and no time to deal with the minutia of good and bad search engine optimization. Even the smallest tweak to your code or site organization can help search engines better understand your goals and what you should rank for. Before you give up on SEO or put it aside for other site aspects, here are seven tips to help you get started with simple, future-proof SEO techniques that you can perform without much hassle.

Focus on Great Content and Not Keywords

The search engine optimization business focuses too much on keywords instead of good content for readers. Google even tells you to focus on great content for readers rather than content made for bots. If you thought content was all about keywords, algorithm changes have changed that way of thinking. You don’t need to focus on keywords other than having the phrase at least somewhere in the content. Focus on content and engaging readers instead of keyword density, phrases and tricking search engines.

Sign Up for SEO Tools

Several SEO tools make it easier to monitor your site. SEO is easier using PosiRank, which manages much of the monitoring and reporting for your site. When you search for the right tools, find something that easily snaps into code using plugins or automation. You want something that gives you reports using plenty of visual aids that make analysis easier to understand.

Meta Tags

Modern search engine algorithms don’t use meta tags to rank your site, but these meta tags play a role in site marketing. The meta description tag displays in search engine result pages, which improves your click through rate (CTR). The keyword meta tag isn’t used by most search engines, but small engines might use them for signals. There are several meta tags, and some of them are used by only some third-party applications. Plugins help you manage these meta tags, and they are easy to include with each article.

Create a Calendar for Content Creation

You should write content for your site regularly. Most site owners add a blog to their site to make content management easier. Several content management systems snap into sites written in PHP or .NET. You just need to add the content. Content creation keeps search engines regularly crawling your site. When you don’t have regular content creation, search engines pick up on it and ignore your site for days. If you write content for readers several times a week, the search engines will crawl your site more frequently.

Add Responsive Design

If you’re looking to redesign your website, responsive design is a technique used to scale your site’s layout based on the size of the reader’s screen. Tablets and smartphones are taking over as the majority of web traffic on the Internet. Responsive designs make your site friendlier to these smaller devices, so users are more likely to stay on your pages instead of bouncing for a mobile-friendly design.

Register with Google Webmaster Tools

Google sends alerts to site owners regarding technical problems with the site. If your site is down, the bot can’t crawl the site or even if you receive a manual penalty, Google Webmaster Tools will send you an alert to the registered email. You can add a meta tag to the site’s code or upload an HTML file to verify your ownership. Once you’ve registered, you can review your site as it’s seen by the search engine crawlers every month. Google Webmaster Tools also tells you the number of pages indexed, any errors seen on your pages, and it can even detect hidden hacks on your site that you would have otherwise never known were there.

Create Friendly URLs

User-friendly URLs (sometimes called SEO-friendly URLs) make it easier for users to remember your pages. These URLs point to dynamic query string parameters. When you view URLs with parameters such as “?p=13,” a user-friendly URL turns it into something easier to remember such as “/my-friendly-page/.” Most site owners use the page’s title to dynamically generate a URL structure, but you can generate any number of structures to organize your pages.

These seven tips improve SEO but won’t go out of style any time soon. Once you add these techniques to your website business and design plan, you won’t need to go back and change code or settings any time soon. It takes time for SEO changes to show any improvement, but even the smallest optimization change can improve your rank and increase visibility in search engines.

Chris Corey SEO Wildman