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Back in 2014, I co-founded OOJO, a Digital Marketing Agency in Singapore. One of the first things I set in motion was to do a digital marketing strategy that is SEO and rank the Digital Marketing Singapore agency’s website on the 1st Page of Google and other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, etc. It took a lot of time and effort. And my team and I managed to achieve it within 3 months only!
That is quite a feat considering our major keyword phrase is a highly competitive one, and most SEO experts will tell you that it would usually take 6 months to a year, sometimes more, to make that happen. We attributed our success due to our deep and strong knowledge of SEO, which is Search Engine Optimization.
Digital Marketing
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SEO Tactics to Rank a Website on 1st Page of Google
In the early days of Internet (during the 90s) when I started designing and developing websites, I kind of already did SEO. But back then, I had no idea I was doing it. I did it as part of a logical way to identify the websites. For example, the title tag was to identify the name of the website and the type of products or services the brand provides.
SEO has come a long way since then. Today, there is On Page SEO where you did everything on your website to enable the search bots to find your website and know what your website is all about. And then there is Off Page SEO where it involves stuff like backlinks and social signals, all of which are to inform the search bots that the online community outside of your website thinks your website is important, too.
And then there are the basic techniques, which may rank your website somewhere but most probably not on the 1st Page of Google and other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, etc. Advanced techniques do really deep SEO, and these are the ones that can really help rank your website on the 1st Page of Google and other search engines. Naturally, my team and I did both.
Keyword Research
SEO starts with the all-important Keyword Research. This is research to find out what keywords that people are using to find businesses, products or services like yours. There are many tools that you can use to find keywords. My team and I use Google Keyword Planner.
The results of the research showed a long list of keywords and phrases for businesses like OOJO, and the services provided by OOJO. Our team analyzed the long list, and selected our main keyword phrase – Digital Marketing Agency Singapore. We then proceeded to start On Page SEO.
More about On Page SEO, Click Image
On Page SEO
On OOJO’s homepage, we added the main keyword phrase – Digital Marketing Agency Singapore – into the Title Tags, Headers, Alt Tags, and Meta Descriptions. Of course, all written in a natural way. We did the same for the content. One thing to be careful is not to over-stuff the content with the main keyword phrase. Google does not like that, and will penalize a site for it.
The same is done for the other web pages for the entire website. But not every page would be using the same main keyword phrase. Depending on what the page is about, we would choose another keyword or keyword phrase, and repeat this first step of On Page SEO for that particular page.
Another On Page SEO tactic I used was to interlink the pages. This is very powerful as it indicates to the search bots that certain pages on a website are important. The importance can help with the ranking.
More about Keywords and Keyword Research, Click Image
Index Your Site with Google, Bing and Other Search Engines
You can choose to do this step after you started on some Off Page SEO. But I prefer to get the sites I work on to be indexed by search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo as soon as possible.
An XML sitemap informs the search engines about the URLs on a website that are available for crawling and indexing. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each web page, when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to the other web pages on that site. This makes the search engines crawl the site more intelligently.
These days, it is very simple to submit an XML sitemap for indexing, especially with WordPress sites. OOJO is designed with a WordPress theme. So all I did was install a plugin that helped me create the XML sitemap. After that, I submitted the XML Sitemap link to all the search engines.
Off Page SEO
Following that, we started on Off Page SEO. That includes Link Building (such as Web 2.0, Social bookmarking, directory submission, article submission, and more), getting listed on Local Business Directories, sending Social Media Signals via Social Media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Google+, etc.
I am a believer that the future of Content Marketing is using Videos. Hence, I am a firm believer that every digital marketing strategy must include Video Marketing, and that includes doing Video SEO. For OOJO, we applied this digital marketing tactic and ranked OOJO’s videos on 1st Pages of YouTube Search.
Off Page SEO can be very extensive, and requires a lot of time and effort. It can and will include Crosslinking, Photo Sharing, Local Listing, Blogging and Blog Promotion. This is not an exhaustive list as there can and will be more Off Page SEO tactics. I share more about this in the courses I conduct.
OOJO Ranked on 1st Page of Google with 3 Months!
It took a lot of time and effort. My team and I worked daily, even on weekends, and extensively. And it all paid off!
In slightly less than 3 months, OOJO’s website reached the 1st Page of Google and other search engines. It has been 2 years, and our ranking still remained on the 1st Page of Google. Below you can see the screen capture of search result done on 11 November 2016.
Before reaching Page 1, OOJO depended mostly on offline promotional activities, word of mouth marketing and referrals to get leads and sales. Since reaching Page 1, OOJO has seen an increase in sales leads, many that have led to confirmed sales.
Since then, I have helped many websites reach 1st Page of Google and other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, etc. If you like to see the same happen on your website, please do contact me and let’s discuss.
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If you have ANY questions about this article, ANY at all, please submit your questions as comments below. I will be happy to help you out.
Thank you for reading this.
Best wishes to all!
Timotheus
Digital Marketer, Lecturer, Amazon Bestselling Author & Cancer Survivor
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