It would be very tough for any new business to succeed without any website. Success online also translates to financial success. In order to do so, business owners must ensure that they have a website that is search engine friendly. All that’s needed is to apply SEO basics and create quality content that your target audience responds to.
Of course, that’s easier said than done.
For any business owners new to the industry, a quick Google search might not always yield the best results. Sometimes, a fair bit of experience might be needed in order to find success and help get the fledgling business off the ground.
SEO or search engine optimization is a step in the right direction. It will put any website or on the map to which other internet users can see. But SEO will only go so far. There are other important puzzle pieces that need to be in place to achieve business success.
Below are a couple of tips you can apply to your website to improve its design to attract more traffic.
Make sure it is easy to crawl.
Crawling is a term often used by SEO experts and digital marketers to that act of a search engine like Google, with the use of bots, to scan the content of a website for the purpose of indexing it. This is crucial since it will give information to any search engine about the content of the website and feature it back to users who search for particular topics.
One of the first tips any experienced web developer will tell you is to make sure that all the elements of your website are friendly to search engines, even if it means avoiding the use of Flash. It can be difficult to make Flash objects accessible and it can make crawling your website harder. When a search engine finds it hard to crawl a site, it might mean a lower ranking when people search for it. It’s better to stick to CSS or JavaScript as it offers the same effects and features without sacrificing your ranking in search engines.
Make your website mobile-friendly.
More and more people are turning to their phones when they want to access the internet. A decade ago, that position was given to desktop PCs. The popularity of smartphones can certainly be blamed for this trend. The upside is there are more people regularly using the internet than ever before. This is great news for businesses since it means new customers. But in order to reach these new users, they must first ensure that their website can be viewed on a smaller screen.
The good news is that making websites adapt to screen size has never been easier. A decade ago required the help of IT and computer science, experts, to facilitate, whereas now there are numerous site templates that automatically accommodate any type of screen size. As business owners, it is their responsibility to make sure all the important elements of their website remain visible and navigable no matter what device the site is being accessed from.
Use snippets
Snippets are excerpts from a website. This is displayed at the very top of the search engine results page, right above regular results. Snippets are commonly displayed when a question is asked in the search box in order to reduce the number of clicks a user has to do. In order to get your website listed as a snippet, it’s crucial that you are on the first page of the search results. It can take time for your site to get that top spot but great content and smart web marketing decisions will get you there eventually.
Understand video SEO
SEO and digital marketing is an industry that continues to change, evolve, and adapt depending on emerging trends. One such trend that is making a lot of splashes is video marketing. More and more people are turning to sites like YouTube when they want to look up products or services they want to purchase. Google has responded with the trend by including a dedicated section for videos on their search results page.
Google recently introduced a video carousel. In the past, video search results were featured as three thumbnails at the top of the search page. Google replaced that with a carousel that displays more video results. Of course, YouTube videos always rank high than any other video content. Creating videos and posting them on YouTube can help to drive more traffic to your website and boost your SEO ranking.
On-page optimization
On-page optimization means those site owners making sure their content is noticed by search engines. It involves:
- looking for important keywords and topics that fit your website.
- Using keywords and secondary keywords in the content.
- Using meta-description tags and title tags for photos and videos.
- Incorporating internal links to other pages in your website.
On-page optimization sits at the core of a good SEO website design. Without it, it would be tough for your site to rank high.
Off-page optimization
Off-page optimization, on the other hand, is a marketing strategy that aims to promote your website via link building as well as social media mentions. This helps to increase the authority and credibility of your site and bring in more traffic.
To start link building, you can guest post on other people’s blogs and register your site on product pages and directories.
Voice search optimization
If you’ve heard of search engine optimization, then get ready for voice search optimization. The rise of smart speakers has facilitated the boom in voice search. No longer will people type in their questions and queries when they can just ask it away and get the answer quickly.
When it comes to voice search, keep in mind that people say words and phrases in different ways so in trying to optimize for voice search, put phrasing as a priority.
