It may seem simple to get your website up and running, but there is a lot more to online success than simply launching your business website. If you have no visitors on your site, then you may as well not even exist in the digital community.
Search engine optimization is the answer to boosting traffic on your business website. Once you optimize your site design to please the search engines of the internet, you will rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Proper SEO strategies are ongoing, and your business website is a constant work in progress. Here are a few helpful SEO design tips to get the optimization process started right away.
Create internal links
Internal links are links within the content of your website that lead to other page destinations within the site. Search engines love internal links, because it makes it much easier to navigate around the site.
By adding internal links, you create a network within your website that is easy for search engines to crawl around. Build a stationary navigation bar, like this example page has done, and you will instantly create a system of internal links within your design.
Optimize your meta data
Metadata is all the extra info describing your page that search engines provide in their listings. Your page descriptions, title tags, and the alt text on your site’s image files are all considered metadata.
A lot of novice designers tend to skip over these entries, and they leave their metadata blank. Leaving your metadata blank leaves the search engines less information to define the content of your website, and can hurt your chances in the SERPs.
Learn to pinpoint proper keywords and phrases
The words and phrases included in the text of your website’s design act as an indicator for search engines. When a web user enters the words “llamas running,” for example, Google (or whatever search engine you use) quickly sorts through endless data to find all the entries that contain a collection of those terms.
Practically, you want to research what keywords and phrases best identify your website’s subject matter, and integrate those terms into the text of your website as often as is natural to the message.
Hint: Unnaturally saturating your text with poignant keywords or phrases will only tip Google off to someone trying to cheat the algorithm, so don’t overdo it.
Create a business blog
Create a space for a business blog within your design. Not only will a blog create more content for your website, but it will give visitors a reason to stay longer. You can also use your business blog to integrate social media share buttons.
When readers share your blog posts on social media, your business instantly gains a small piece of free marketing. Success online is largely dependent upon your organization’s ability to be seen.
Originally posted on April 4, 2018 @ 9:16 am