If your business currently has a website, you’re ahead of nearly 50 percent of other businesses out there. But, don’t let that knowledge make you complacent.
These days, simply having a website isn’t enough to keep your business relevant. You also need to figure out how to optimize your website so that people can easily find it.
Not sure where to being when it comes to optimizing your site? Don’t panic. We’ve got seven easy tips to help you get started.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
First, let’s briefly clarify what search engine optimization (or, SEO) is.
Search engine optimization is all about increases online visibility through organic search engine results. Organic, in this case, means non-paid.
In order to optimize your website to improve your search engine rankings, you’ll need to utilize a variety of creative and technical strategies.
The world of SEO is constantly evolving, so it’s important to consistently learn more about works and doesn’t work for search engines.
When you’re first getting started, though, a few simple steps can go a long way.
How to Optimize Your Site
Search engine optimization might seem a bit complicated at first. But, with a little practice, you’ll soon find that it’s not as difficult as some people make it out to be.
If you start with these seven tips, you can significantly improve your site optimization.
1. Create a Blog and Consistently Publish High-Quality Content
Adding a blog to your website can help boost your search engine rankings. A blog makes it easy for you to continually update your site. This, in turn, keeps your site relevant to search engines like Google and constantly gives them new pages to index.
Now, in order to have a blog truly work for you, you need to make sure the content you’re posting is well-written and valuable to your customers.
What makes high-quality blog content? Some basic guidelines include:
- Posts should be at least 500 words, but longer content is preferable
- Posts should use proper grammar and be free from spelling mistakes
- Posts should contain keywords relevant to your business and industry
- Posts should be interesting and fun for people to read
Crafting interesting, well-written blog posts can take some time. But it will be time well spent.
If you’re able to regularly update your site with fresh content, you’ll likely see a boost in your search engine rankings.
2. Use Longtail Keywords
All your blog posts — as well as all the pages on your website — should contain keywords that make it easy for people to find them when they’re searching for a specific product, service, or topic online.
In the old days of SEO, single-word keywords were sufficient. Now, though, you need to put a little more effort into it.
Longtail keywords are much more effective than their single-word counterparts. In fact, when businesses are trying to figure out why their SEO strategy isn’t working, keywords are one of the first things they look at.
Instead of using a single word, try to optimize your web pages and blog posts with phrases or short sentences. Think about what people would type into a search engine if they wanted to find a product or service like yours.
With a few simple tweaks, you’ll be able to adjust your content to make it more search engine friendly.
3. Use Keywords Naturally
It’s also important to make sure your keywords sound natural to the people reading your blog posts and the content on your web pages. Write to the reader first.
Remember, it’s not enough just to stuff keywords into your posts willy-nilly. In fact, if your pages are over-saturated with keywords — especially keywords that don’t sound natural — you could end up getting penalized by search engines.
When you focus first on natural, helpful content that contains relevant keywords, the search engine rankings will follow.
4. Choose Effective Page Titles
Make sure you include keyword phrases in the titles of your pages and blog posts.
This will give you a nice search engine boost, and it will make it easier for your readers and potential customers to find information that’s relevant to them.
While long-form content is preferable to search engines, remember that extra long titles are not. Your page titles should be 70 characters or less. Otherwise, they’ll end up shortened in the search engine results.
5. Test and Measure Regularly
Remember, the world of SEO is always evolving. Optimizing your pages once simply isn’t enough.
Once you’ve made adjustments to your web pages and blog content, you need to analyze your rankings and traffic to determine their effectiveness. Monitor rankings and assess keywords regularly to see whether or not they’re working.
If something doesn’t seem to be working, don’t freak out. Just use that information to adjust your strategy.
6. Speed Up Your Site
A slow website also isn’t good for your search engine rankings. People have short attention spans. If they can’t access your site within a few seconds of clicking on it, they’ll likely leave and never come back.
Test your page speed regularly and make sure it’s running as quickly as possible.
There are lots of tools out there that will allow you to test your site and give you recommendations on how you can speed it back up. Be sure to take these recommendations into account so your site runs as efficiently as possible.
7. Make it Mobile
Finally, make sure your website works just as well on mobile devices as it does on desktop and laptop computers.
Lots of adults do at least some of their shopping and browsing on a cell phone or tablet. If you want to reach these people, your site needs to be able to adjust easily to the smaller screen.
Optimizing your site so that it works on a mobile device will also allow it to load faster, which, as you know, is great for improving your rankings.
Looking for More SEO Tips?
Now that you know how to optimize your website, it’s important to take steps to keep it optimized.
One of the best things you can do to stay in the loop is to make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest SEO strategies.
Our blog is a great resource for this. It’s regularly updated with great information and steps you can take to further optimize your site. Check it out today!
