Getting noticed on search engine result pages is one of the most critical phases of successful online business. Website development is the first step in creating an online presence, followed by search engine optimization, reaching out to the target audience, increasing your website traffic, engaging the audience with the website, content, company information, products and service, and finally compel them to act. So, the entire process is successful when your users purchase products/services from the website and remain loyal to you for the years to come.
In this post, we will be focusing on how to optimize your online business using SEO services. We will be discussing elaborately on how to make website user friendly, reducing load time, getting a high ranking SERP, increasing footfall, keeping the user engaged, and give users reason to come back to the website, and continue maintaining the overall quality.
Method 1
Engaging in Activities that Help in Optimizing Your Website for Increased Visibility
Evaluate Your Website
Evaluation of your website is the first step towards achieving your online business goals. You will need to assess and find out what changes can improve the performance of your website so that it can give you the desired results. This process is elaborate and requires detailed study keeping all the aspects in mind. Right from the structure of the websites, navigation, categories, user-experience, user-engagement, content, current performance, load time, traffic, bounce rates, conversions, and overall appearance. Before you take any action, list down all the problems at one place, and then determine necessary steps to add value to your website. It will help you work systematically, and there won’t be any chance of missing out on anything. You should also make sure that all the content on your website is consistent. There should not be any kind of inconsistencies in your website as search engines identify web pages via domain names, header tags and title tags.
Analyze Competitors’ Websites
Keeping track of competitors’ online activities is a healthy practice to succeed in online business. It helps you gain insights into the tasks that need to be executed. Identify at least 5 of your business competitors and find out what methods they are following to achieve their online goals. This will also include their keywords and website structures, features, and more. Copying their website definitely won’t be a very wise decision for any business, but then being aware of your competitions’ plans helps in detecting your strengths and weaknesses.
Identify Relevant Keywords for Your Website
Keywords are words and phrases that help your audience find your business online. But to make that possible, you will have to ensure that your website is easily searchable using the keywords that your users use to find you. So, what are those keywords that will make your website easily searchable? You will have to do research and identify a comprehensive list of keywords relevant to your business and website content. Keywords are popular search terms used by people to find the information they need. Search engines understand those keywords and produce results of the pages that contain those particular keywords in their content. And if these keywords are present on your website, then chances of your website being placed as one of the top result pages of search engines become easier.
That’s why, when you engage in keyword research, make sure you have identified keywords for the overall topic of the site and also for the topic of specific webpages. Specific keywords make the results more accurate. If you find the keyword research process a not so easy task, you can always look for online tools that will assist you in identifying relevant keywords for your website.
Position Your Keywords Tactically
Ask any search engine optimizer or any online marketer, and they will tell you how important keyword positioning is in the website content. Keywords play a key role in influencing the performance of your website on search engine result pages. However, there are chances that you might get penalized for overuse of keywords, also called keyword spamming. Therefore, you need to understand how and where to position your keyword to get the optimal results.
Apart from including them strategically in all the pages on your website, you must also place your keywords in header tags, title tags, meta tags, anchor text, and URLs too.
Add Meta Title Tags
Meta title tags are used to inform the search engine and other bots about the information on the webpage. The tags are used to influence search engine ratings. What you must do:
- Add meta title tags at the top of every webpage in a website to help search engines identify the content on the page.
- Add appropriate information in the meta description tags, as search engines use the description to describe the page in search result pages.
- Add a meta keyword tag that will help search engine bots identify the main keywords for every web page on the website.
Though Google’s search bots do not take a keen interest in meta keywords, they do impact other search engines.
Monitor Website Traffic and Develop Reports
While assessing your website before working on the list of planned activities also make a report of your website traffic. Do monitor the visits to your WebPages and take out a detailed report of the same. The reports must have a complete analysis of activities taking place on your website, the type of traffic you are receiving, location of the visitors, most visited pages, least visited pages, most shared pages and how they rank on search engines. If you have been assessing your pages, then continue to do it for the next couple of months to understand the psyche of your visitors and also to know how your website is performing currently. If you have not started assessing the performance of your website yet, then you must start doing it immediately to keep track of the activities and improvements.
There are several website analytics tools that you use for this monitoring and report making purpose.
This activity is an essential part of SEO technique as it helps in monitoring the activities, and their performances in the website optimization process.
Publish New and Fresh Content Regularly
Content is the most vital factor when we plan the implementation of SEO techniques to increase the visibility of a website. In this age, when the entire world is concerned about information overload, it is very critical to figure out what is the right content for a website to maintain its performance on the search engines. Unless you give something unique and useful, it is not easy to keep your visitors glued to your website.
Ensure the content that you publish in your website and blogs is unique, fresh, relevant and useful for your target audience to keep them interested and make them come back for more. It will bring traffic to your website, and further lead you to rank higher on search engines, helping you in boosting your business online.
While writing, be aware of the fact that unless your pages have good quality content, it won’t be easy to grab the attention of your audience. Moreover, keep updating your website with fresh content at least once or twice a week for desired results. More relevant content you have better will be your ranking on the search result pages.
Build Backlink Network with Reputed Websites
Even though backlink building is an old SEO technique, it still continues to secure a respectable place whenever there is a need for search engine optimization of websites and blogs and building an online reputation. It is one of the most rewarding techniques used by SEO experts and online marketers to increase search engine ranking and website visibility.
Here is how you can use backlink techniques to make your brand more noticeable online:
- List your website links in related forums, directories and other link sharing platforms. Request websites with similar information like yours to allow you to link to content on your website.
- Many search engines give value to websites with backlinks to and from reputed websites. Thus, this would be an additional technique to get higher ranking on search results and increased visibility online.
- Additionally, you can also approach a media person or reputed bloggers, who might agree to exchange links with your website or even create a piece of content for you to help you boost your visibility on search engine result pages.
Create a Structured Sitemap
Sitemaps list all the URLs of your website at one place. These XML files are either created by the website owners, or web hosts may provide it to the website. You can easily make it. If you have no idea how sitemaps look, then you can check online examples and follow them. Once you have created the sitemap, you can upload it to the root folder of your web server. Then, search for online platforms to submit your sitemap. A sitemap is also helpful in telling you about the existing links in your website and at the same time also makes updating, removing and replacing non-functional links easier, while optimizing the website.
Also, make sure you keep updating your sitemap as and when you make updates to your website and do the same in the online sitemap publishing platforms too. Nothing is more annoying for users than landing on broken links. So, you have to be very careful about managing them properly.
Stop Using Frames as Much as Possible
Though using frames decreases your download times, they can also become a blocker to search engines bots from reading your website. A sitemap can help you in resolving this problem.
Authenticate Your HTML Code
Search engines do not care if your HTML code is correct or not, but when it comes to finding which part of the pages has to be indexed then, they depend on the basic accuracy of the code. If there is an error in your HTML code, then it is very much possible that many parts of your web page won’t be found in the search engine records. W3C or any other similar site can help you authenticate your HTML codes by finding the errors if they have any.
Keep Making Improvements in Your Website
You must continue to improve on your websites after every assessment that must take once in three months. You can assess website performance almost every month. Ensure that you generate monthly reports to get an idea of whether your keywords are performing or not. And then keep removing the wrong keywords and add the more efficient ones as your progress.
You must continuously monitor the keyword performance, as keyword trends keep changing as the demand in the market changes.
Add Call to Action in Your Webpage Content
Call to Actions (CTAs) refers to a piece of content such as an image, button or text intended to prompt users to take a specific action on your website. These could be in form of clicking on a link, sending an enquiry, submitting forms requesting for quotations, subscribing for a service, calling on a number, sending an email or in many intense cases, go and make purchases. So, in CTAs websites can provide a link to the users which they can use to take action. There can be multiple options to select from, and if you can provide good CTAs then your user engagement at your website will increase. Avoid linking CTAs to external links.
Method 2
Optimizing Your Website to Make It Easily Accessible
Create Recognizable and Readable Web Page URLs
Using readable URLs help users recall the specific page and information they want to view. Users can easily recognize what the page is about after seeing the URLs. Use of page-title based links is recommended instead of numerical links that would help your website get noticed by users easily.
Make a 404 Error Page
Whenever users type wrong spelling of website URLs in the address bar, they bump into 404 error pages (example: “www.abc.com/search-egnine-optmizatoin” in place of “www.abc.com/search-engine-optimization”). In such situations, you can always customize your pages with some interesting and humorous content mentioning they have entered a broken link. Also, make sure, you link that page with either the home page or some important/popular pages of the website.
Add a Website Navigation Section
Navigation is an essential element of a website. It helps the user navigate across and move from one section/page to another. Either you can put it as an independent hanging bar which is common in all the webpages of the website or can use a hamburger menu on the top left/right corner of the website pages. Clicking on that menu or the tab can open a list of page links (all clickable). You can also add help and download links wherever required. Also, try adding the in-site “search” button that will help users search for specific information within the website.
Write Short and Simple Content
People are perpetually under time constraints, so there is always a high demand for short and simple content on websites. It has to be crisp and concise while avoiding jargon and complex sentences. This caters to a large section of users on the internet. A content piece of around 300 – 350 words is the right length. However, you can always write long content wherever there is a need (in the range of 700 to 2500 words).
Method 3
Working to Optimize the Performance of Your Website
Reduce Use of Heavy Applications
Use of Flash and Java can bring down the page load speed, and webpages can take longer to load. Avoid using heavy applications that can affect the page load time and also do not allow videos embedded videos from YouTube, Vimeo) to play automatically.
Optimize your Website Images before Uploading
Large-sized images can slow down the load speed of your websites and also burn down the server hosting space to a large extent. It can annoy your users so much so that they might end up leaving your website and moving to your competitor’s website, which loads faster than your website. To fix this problem, avoid uploading large images and optimize your images before posting them on websites. You can find several photo editors that give you an option to optimize photos before publishing. Images make your website look appealing to your audience, but if not optimized before uploading they can slow down your websites, resulting in slowing down your traffic to your website. Ensure you use your images very sensibly.
Reduce Use of CSS and JavaScript Code
Avoid using too much JavaScript code and CSS as they add a lot of size to websites, making them load slowly. By minifying their use, you can remove all unnecessary codes and characters, comments, newlines, empty space, etc. It boosts the load time of your webpages, making your website load faster and also optimizes your website on the SERP.
Use the Latest Version of PHP in Development
You must use the latest version of PHP while developing your website. It will help you in getting the improved version that will be beneficial for your website in improving its performance. You must keep updating your code as per the trends and latest updates made. However, you don’t have to bother to update your PHP coding manually if you are using hosting services of WordPress or Weebly.
Enable Your Website to Cache Files in Your Local System
If this is done, then your website will not have to reprocess data while loading pages every time they revisit a website.
However, if users keep cleaning their browser caches and cookies, they won’t benefit from this, but then there will be a huge impact on your website performance, leading to increased online traffic and finally, success in online business.