Optimizing Your Website

When putting together a website it is important for long term growth and sustainability that you include Search Engine Optimization in your plans.

Search engines provide a place where people go when they are looking to search for information. Google has around an 80% market share of search engine traffic, and if you can get your page to show high up on their pages you can get masses of traffic visiting your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important if you want to attract organic traffic to your website from the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Do you want some of that traffic?

Then here are a few things you need to do to optimize your site to give you the best chance of gaining visibility in the search engines.

On page SEO
Page title appears in the top bar of the browser window and informs the search engines what the topic of your website is all about.
Appears as the title on search engines result pages.

Headings h1, h2, h3… tags
By using these tags they are seen as more important than other text on your website by the search engine spiders.

Description
Appears in search engines so keep it short, about 160 characters and targeted.
Each page should have its own description

Keywords
The keyword related to your page, this can be different for each page of your website

ALT tags
Tag your images with a relevant title as the search engine spiders cannot read images.

While it is said that meta-tags do not hold the same ranking power they once did, it still remains a good idea to include them for SEO purposes. Title tags and description tags in particular are important as they will show up in the search engines, keyword tags are of lesser value, but still sometimes relevant.

It never hurts to cover as many bases as possible as far as SEO is concerned. Make sure your on page SEO is relevant to your site. If you don’t know html then learn it, it’s not difficult, I knew nothing about html when I started. There are plenty of sites with relevant information just do a search in google for html tags.

Blog

Starting a blog will enhance your ranking in the search engines. Make sure your content is unique. A blog can create quite a stir with just one article whether it is an article full of great information or a controversial article.

Each article can be set on its own page so optimization is directed only towards that one article each time and not the whole site, this allows for more targeted use of longtail keyword phrases.

People are much more likely to link to a blog with good articles than a sales page.

Opt-in form

Put lead capture forms on all your pages, Keep your forms short, name and email is all you require. Link to your privacy policy or put a statement under your opt-in form.

Measuring your stats

Some of the stats you need to analyze:

Number of visitors – how many people visited your site, how many were unique visitors and how many were returning visitors

Sign ups – how many visitors signed up to your list

Sales – how many sales did you make

Length of time spent on your site – how long did they stay at your site

Number of pages viewed – how many pages did your visitors view

Exit page – the page they exited from, if more people leave from one particular page then you need to look at it. Does it need improving or re-writing, is it relevant!

Optimizing your onpage  SEO takes very little time and is easily achievable, use your stats to analyze where you can improve your website once you are getting some traffic to your pages.

Resources:

Here are some useful resources that will help you:

Website Grader

Google Analytics

Tagged with: Search engine optimization • SEO

Filed under: SEO

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