These days, if your business is not on the web, it’s all but invisible to potential clients. Yet just having a website isn’t enough. There are millions of other businesses online, and your customers aren’t going to wade through all of them to find yours. Your website needs to be one of the first that customers see when they search for terms related to your products and services, or else they are likely to go to your competitor’s site instead — regardless of whether your competitor actually has a better quality product or service.
Learn How to Create a Website that is Search-Engine friendly
You can pay for advertising to get your site in front of more people, or you can employ the right search engine optimization strategies — which are totally free. SEO refers to a wide set of practices that help Google and other search engines better understand the quality and content of your site to determine if it’s the best fit for those searching for related terms. The higher quality Google deems your site to be, and the better the match, the higher your site will appear in search results and the more visitors you will get.
Here are a few things you can do to make your website more search-engine friendly to increase your visitors and your customer base:
Get a Good Host and Domain
Your domain name needs to be easy to remember, but it should also include keywords for your site. For example, “A Cut Above” may be a cute name for a hairstylist, but it doesn’t tell Google much about your site. Instead, NChairstylist [dot] com tells the site that you are a hair stylist in North Carolina, giving you a keyword hit and a location match. Your name can still be “A Cut Above,” but your domain can be used to signal information to Google and boost your rankings.
Next, choose a good host. You need a host that will provide consistent service. If your site is slow to load or experiences a lot of outages, that will decrease your page rank and lose you visitors. Your site speed and bounce rate are both used by Google to determine site quality, and both will suffer with a bad host.
Of course, you can’t understand what the user experience is like without a good Internet connection yourself. Make sure you are operating under a great provider and plan to test out your site’s speed and performance. Look around and do some price comparison. If one of their plans meet your needs, get Frontier Internet today!
Choose a Responsive Design
More and more people are accessing websites on their mobile devices, including smart phones and tablets. In fact, Smart Insights reports that more people use their mobile devices (51 percent) to access the Internet than they do their desktop computers (42 percent). Yet mobile devices have a smaller screen and websites do not show up the same way as they do on a desktop. If you haven’t designed your site with this in mind, critical information can be cut off or visitors might have a hard time finding what they need, losing you visitors and sales.
You have to choose a responsive design that will automatically adjust according to the device used to access it. That means that the website will automatically take on a different design for smaller screens, ensuring that users spend more time on your site and find the information that they need.
Fill in All Page Elements
The code on your page includes plenty of markers that your readers don’t see but the search engines do. These markers tell search engines about the content on your page and your site, helping spiders crawl your site faster and better understand the right readers to show it to in search results. Make sure that you fill in all of these page elements to get the most exposure for your site. These page elements include title tags, meta descriptions, image tags, categories, and more.
When you are using a content management system like WordPress, you can easily fill in these elements using the editor.You can also use plugins like Yoast SEO that will let you know what elements are missing and give you feedback about the quality of information you have entered.
You don’t have to be a programmer or an online marketing wizard to implement effective SEO, nor do you have to hire a pricey agency to do it for you. You just need to do the right keyword research, write great content, and use these simple tips to improve your website’s page rank and get the exposure you need. The best part: You can do all of it for free! You can soon be competing with the largest companies in your niche on even a shoestring budget.