Search Engine Optimization, or SEO is the act of taking steps to improve visibility of one’s website and other assets online when people search for information online. It is often called “positioning one’s assets for organic” search, as opposed to PPC (Pay Per Click) which requires you to pay fees to search engines to help you stand out.
How do you make your website more visible? My list below is by no means complete but it will serve to give you a solid overview to tasks you can complete to make your site more visible.
Search Engine Registration: The first thing you will want to do is to get your website registered with the search engines themselves. Search engines provide a way to inform them about you and your site. You can even submit a Sitemap.xml file. Next, you’ll need to give them information about each of your webpages. This will allow them to store and index the data in their databases so they can use it when making “Organic search”. Every search engine offers a different method for accepting webpage indexing requests. Yahoo!Bing lets you submit up to 10 pages per day, while Google provides a tool that allows you to request indexed webpages. You must register every page using the tool as a standard website and register them separately as mobile pages for “Mobile Responsive” construction. Google has separate databases for these pages. To be found on mobile devices, Google will require you to create links to your site via other high-quality Internet sites. You can do this by posting on forums and asking for links from other sites. Writing press releases and articles that link to your website are all good ideas. The more “External Backlinks” you can create to your site, the stronger your site looks in the eyes of Google and other search engines and the better your site will rank within those engines organically.
On Site Optimization: There are also things you can do within your own website to strengthen your SEO rankings with search engines. You will be wanting to do keyword and keyword phrase research as you build webpage titles and write content for those pages, do the same for images you use so they are well described, link pages together so they can keep people on your site longer by easily giving them more access to additional related content on your site, create “Anchor Text” on your site which means taking strong keyword phrases and embedding hyperlinks to other locations on-site and off-site behind this text.
Content Creation: Write your website content in such a way that the webpage title and description are supported by your content words as close to the top of each page’s content as possible as this helps to validate these pages as being real and of value to the search engines when they render pages to their own content consumers.
Use of Videos, Audios and Images: Use them liberally on their site as search engines know that people to prefer to watch videos, look at pictures or listen to audios more than they like to read text – so use this strategy and be sure to richly describe them within your webpages’ “meta-data” and to also submit them for indexing to the search engines as well. It is tedious work, but will pay significant dividends to your site over time in terms of its visibility.
Build your webpages to be “Mobile-Responsive”: These days, search engines such as Google will not even display pages that are not responsive to people making “Organic” queries for content through them. Your webpage will be rejected if it isn’t responsive.
Build web pages natively: Test your websites for loading speed and avoid using templates whenever possible. Your webpages, and especially your mobile pages, will not load in 2-4 seconds. Because templates pages are often “Fatter”, they load slower. Also keep your image sizes small – 4 megabyte images take much longer to load than 20K images…
Keyword Competitive Analysis: Do competitive analysis on your keyword research and where you place with those keywords in relation to your competitors. You can look at the keywords that are ranking for your desired phrases and terms in organic searches. Then, research what it takes to make it rank on page 1 for those words and phrases. There are many tools available to help you do this. The bottom line is you want to be on page 1 when you rank for keywords and phrases you select and the SEO effects they have on your website.
Search engines create informational dashboards that allow you to view how search engines see your site, and to make suggestions about improvements. These dashboards are great! These dashboards are very useful for maintaining good search engine rankings. This is a key step to maintain good search engine rankings. It takes time and effort to improve organic SEO, but the ones who do it are often rewarded with more traffic. Any company that wants to be successful online should strive for organic SEO. Traffic is money. If others do this, you will get the customers you desire. This is often the key to business survival.