Search Engine Optimization. It’s a mouthful for a reason… it takes effort to make your website stand out and in return, increase traffic to your website. While it’s easier to simply get your website live and let it be, it’s more beneficial to your business to consider how SEO can help you. Your online search engine ranking is important, and the ten important points below can help you achieve the success you deserve for an online presence.
1. Place appropriate keywords throughout your site. Titles, blogs, other content, URLs and image words all should include words that will help pull your rank up in your ideal category of searches. For example, do you sell candles? The word “candles” should be used as often as possible throughout your site. But don’t get ridiculous – spammers are known for overloading their sites with target words that will rank them high. Be smart with your choice of words to compliment your business rather than just focus on the obvious.
2. Link back to your own archives. By doing this you will engage your audience longer on your website, therefore increasing the overall value or your site and your search engine ranking.
3. Keep your URLs condense and focused. Don’t get fancy with your URL addresses. The simpler, the better. Use strong, relevant words that are focused on your audience, subject matter and business. Avoid extra words such as “the” and “again”.
4. Avoid Flash and other splash pages. This just slows your site down, and does absolutely nothing for SEO. It may look pretty, but a good majority of the time your audience gets impatient waiting for it and moves on to another site… not your goal.
5. Update your web content regularly. Keeping your content fresh allow for higher ranking in search engines. Plain and simple, this has to be incorporated into your website strategy to be effective in SEO ranking. A blog is a great way to do this, but changing content and product descriptions is also effective.
6. Have a site map. A website with valuable content and lots to gain from typically requires a map of sorts to help navigate it. This same site map helps your SEO. A navigation bar is an example of a site map for smaller sites, which are also effective.
7. Have multiple domain names. If you sell a particularly hot product, for example, give them their own domain name. Make this website then link to your main website and so forth. These link backs will increase your overall SEO.
8. Share your links via social media. The power of Twitter (easy RT’s – sharing of posts and links) and Facebook is amazing. If you have a great link to share, make sure you are sharing this via social media in addition to your other outlets – notably your subscribers and RSS feed. This will definitely increase your SEO if done often.
9. Engage your site with other sites. This may mean offering to post an article on another site that links back to yours or sharing some Q&A’s with the idea of driving traffic back to your site. Likewise, do the same for others of appropriate value on your site. The links back and forth will do wonders for SEO – assuming this is part of a more complex SEO strategy. Be aware of your local searches, as well, if you have a business that has a concentrated audience vs. more spread out.
10. Stay on top of your site and SEO. Monitor your traffic and set goals for yourself. Sitting back and getting… dare I say it… lazy will do nothing for you.
