By increasing your search engine ranking, you raise your site’s popularity and influence. And the greater the number of people who visit your site, the more often (and even higher-ranked) your website will appear in search results and the more likely you’ll be to outrank the millions of other websites out there (including your competition).
Although an entire profession is dedicated to assisting website owners in accomplishing this task, here are some basics to help you maximize your website’s visibility on the World Wide Web. Try the following steps to improve your site’s search rankings, and watch your site jump ahead of your competition:
- Develop a list of relevant keywords that relate to your food truck business.
Think about these words and phrases in terms that someone may use to search for a restaurant or food truck serving a particular style of food. Do you plan to have a rolling hamburger joint? Then start your list with terms related to hamburgers and food trucks.
- Create a list of keywords related to your location.
Does the city you plan to work in have a nickname? Add the proper city name, its abbreviations, and its nicknames.
- After you create your lists, determine which keywords are primary terms and which ones are secondary.
A primary keyword is the main keyword you want your website to rank for and should be placed in your header, footer, and primary titles used on the site. A secondary keyword is placed in your content or is used to support your primary keywords.
For example, in the phrase Middle Eastern Food Truck Business in Los Angeles, the primary keywords are Middle Eastern food truck, and the secondary keywords are business in Los Angeles.
- Use these lists to place keywords throughout the text of your website.
Proper keyword placement maximizes your SEO efforts. Placing your selected words and phrases within your website’s content enables the search engines to establish your relevancy to them, which results in a higher ranking for you.
Within your content, use your primary keywords in titles and sprinkle secondary keywords throughout the body of the content. The best placement within the content is in the opening and closing paragraphs. Using keywords in the opening paragraph helps you immediately establish relevance, and closing out your content with keywords serves as a reminder of the terms’ relevance.
There’s no greater way to provide fresh, updated content on a regular basis than to have a blog on your site. Because blogs are updated on a regular basis, they’re able to attract a lot more search engine attention.
Sound complicated? No worries! Check out the latest edition of Search Engine Optimization For Dummies by Peter Kent (published by John Wiley & Sons) to get an even better understanding of SEO and how you can maximize its use on your food truck website.