Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the term used for a variety of processes and tools that help ensure that your website is found and hopefully found on the first page of any search engine listing for certain words. An entire industry has sprung up as part of the Internet revolution. There is one thing that many of these companies have in common. They make the whole process more confusing than necessary and charge huge amounts of money to the customer, who then trusts them. The tips below will get you at least a couple of steps up the ladder to a high-performing website. These tips aren’t exhaustive, but they will at least start driving traffic to your site.
Tip 1 Website Content
You just need to look at any random website and this point is amply illustrated. The text you use should be visitor friendly. A visitor wants to see what they are looking for quite immediately. If you are looking for a widget maker, the last thing you want to know about is all the machinery that the company has that is used to make the widgets. If you wonder “so what” when you’ve read a website, then the website owners have missed the point. Any website should be about the benefits to the potential customer. The widget customer himself wants to know what color he can get it in, not how they do it. With this in mind, your website copy should not just be about what you do, but what you can do for the customer.
Tip 2 Research keywords and phrases
Ask yourself what search terms people will put into search engines like Google to find you. This is the foundation of all search engine optimization. You need to follow some simple rules and identify which ones are most important to you. Keyword suggestions can be found using the Google Keyword Tool. But don’t be tempted to choose keywords that are the most popular. First, those keywords may be the hardest to optimize for, and second, they may not accurately reflect your product or service. Google provides a useful indication of a keyword’s competitiveness, and a keyword with less competition may be more appropriate.
Tip 3 Include relevant keywords in your text
To make sure your site is more relevant, include keywords in your text. A word of caution here. You shouldn’t be too repetitive with keywords just to get a higher ranking. As we have seen, you should write your text for the people who read it and not for the search engines. You can also have different keywords on the same page or different ones on different pages. This will ensure that every page is optimized, not just the home page.
Tip 4 Call to action
Ask yourself a question after you have read a page on a website. “What do you want me to do now?” Many websites are beautifully written and have well-designed graphics, but then fail to close the deal. That deal might be getting the prospect to click through to another page or even buy something. That is why it is very important to have a strong call to action on each page. This call to action can be anything from “call now” to “buy now to get a free gift” etc. The goal of a website is to attract someone and then get them to do something else.
Tip 5 Keep navigation simple
Today, people generally have a short attention span or are impatient because time is money. You’ll hear variations on a theme of the following statement, but typically when someone comes to your site, you have about 12 seconds to capture them. If they don’t immediately see what they want or have to search through layers of the website, they will leave and your competitors will benefit. As a general rule of thumb, no more than three clicks should get anyone where they need to go to get the information they’re looking for. It also goes without saying that if you optimize a page for a particular keyword or phrase and someone searches for that phrase, they should land on the correct page and not the home page where they have to search for what they want.
Tip 6 Use title tags and alt tags
When you do a search on Google or another search engine, you will be returned the name of a website and some other text. The text used comes from the title tags. By default, many websites include something like “Welcome to our website” or similar. However, a better approach would be to include some of your main keywords. And it’s perfectly acceptable to only include keywords and not turn them into a sentence. You should also keep the company name at the end of the title tags and not at the beginning. All of this means that when someone searches for your keywords, the list will include a title with the keywords they were looking for and this will encourage them to click on your link.
Alternative labels are the text messages you see when you mouse over an image or graphic. It is necessary to describe your chart in this way, as Google cannot ‘see’ charts and will therefore treat them as uninteresting white space. Again, including keywords in your Alt tags will further improve your rankings.
Tip 7 Update regularly
There is nothing worse than seeing a last update date many years before. This says that the company can’t be bothered to keep you up to date. If this is the case, why should the customer be interested? Regular updating is essential for ranking. The more you update your site, the more often Google will come back and the more that happens, the higher your ranking will be. This does not necessarily mean that you have to change your entire website. However, it is worth updating regularly. One way to update your site regularly is to include a news feed or blog. This will allow you to change the content of the site without taking too much time.
Tip 8 Build links
Linking to other sites, both inbound and outbound, is an important part of optimization. The more traffic you have coming from external sites, the better your ranking will be. This means not only trying to get reciprocal links, but also other activities that can be very profitable. Some of the newer approaches include social media. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, among many others, can be used to enhance your brand, but also to encourage people to visit your site. Once you’ve built up your following, particularly among your target customer base, making deals or offering some other incentive through these mediums can often result in increased traffic.
Another way to do it is to write articles like this one on your topic of expertise. Including a link to your website with more information will guarantee more clicks. There are many free press release sites where you can submit your release for distribution. Again, clicks can get you linked to more information on your site.
Tip 9 Add Google Analytics
If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it! All these tips will lead to changes in the number and type of visits to your site. But how do you know if it’s working and how do you know what else to do to improve your SEO? There are many tools available now that will allow you to see how many page views you get on each page, query-to-action conversion, which keywords are important, and much more. One of them is Google Analytics, which is free code generated on the Google website for you to include on every page of your website. This allows the software to keep track of what is happening and gives you the results in terms of a periodic report. Regular review of this report will help you make changes that will improve your site and possibly improve the journey through your site for visitors.
Tip 10 Add a newsletter/download registration
How do you capture the details of those prospects who visit your site? One way is to write a regular newsletter, perhaps with offers or important information. Visitors can sign up to receive this newsletter from your site. Similarly, you can write articles, papers, or other documents relevant to your industry, technology, or market that you can offer to visitors for free in exchange for their email address and other details. This is useful in two ways. You can first use the data to create a database for your newsletters and offers etc. Second, you can use the information to perform our segmentation of your market, allowing you to precisely target your messages to different groups to make them more relevant.
In the world of SEO there are no guarantees and it takes a lot of time and effort, but the results will be worth it. Also be patient as it will take a while for your site to move up the rankings. And finally continue like this. Good SEO requires persistence above all else.
