SEO is a powerful tool in attracting potentialbuyers via search traffic. However, with the changing algorithms of searchengines and increasing global competition, an international SEO (search engineoptimization) marketing strategy needs careful planning to be successful.
Use keywords wisely
To keep in good standing with search engines, use a variety of relevant keywords and phrases in a natural way. Greaterimportance is given to headings and titles so optimize these to include yourbest keywords. While attention-grabbing headlines are great for attractinginterest, these can dilute your SEO efforts. Instead, consider including them inimages.
Google's keyword planner or the Bing keywordresearch tool can give you an idea of search popularity and advertising competitionfor each keyword. This can vary significantly from one country or region to another, making it a good idea to research keywords for each market. Simply addyour choice of country and language to the targeting section of the keywordtool to refine results in this way.
Use Rich Snippets
Over the years, Google, along with otherengineers in the field, have come up with a new way of displaying certaininformation in the form of a schema or rich snippets. This sounds scary at first, but this is nothingelse but the 5 star review or a product or the hours of a business you seeunder some listings.
Although most websites and companies don’t useit, this is a very powerful tool that can help your rankings tremendously. Not only does it increase the amount of webpage real estate you take up (since you have an extra line of info, you take upmore room on the page, look more credible and push your competitors down), Google also tends to give more credit and a higher ranking to web pages that displaythis information. Google likes to seepages that are as user friendly as possible and rich snippets allow the userto make a quick judgment without even opening the page.
Here is a link from Google about Rich Snippetsand how to set them up.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en
Google Authorship
Another very handy tool that Google has comeup with in the past few years is Google Authorship. Essentially, Google recognizes online authorsthat post on blogs, forums, etc. as long as the post is tied to a Google +profile. Google has been making a majorshift to this over the past few years, and in an article released a week ago, the company announced that they will be focusing heavily on expanding the influenceof Google Authorship, which basically means websites with authors associated to them will rank higher than ones without an author. A backlink from these authored websites will also be worth more than one from a general site. This is also great news for all the authors out there, because a post made by an author recognized by Google is beneficial to any blog, which meansit will be much easier to find blogs that will allow you to make a guest post, and this will circulate better content online.
Here is a link from Google about Authorshipand how to set it up. https://plus.google.com/authorship
There are many different aspects of SEO, andit is impossible to cover every one, especially if you are doing SEO byyourself. It is important to focus onthe factors that Google considers to be the more important ones, which can befound online as well (they keep changing). Even though Google made it clear that Google Authorship and RichSnippets will be more and more important in the future, most companies andwebsites are still not using them, which creates a great opportunity to fight for the #1 spot using the above techniques. If SEO is too much of a hassle for you, it might make sense to hire a digital agency to handle optimizing your website. I hope that this post will help you guys start off. Look out over the next few weeks for my postswhere I will go in and analyze the important parts of SEO one by one.