Online businesses must adapt to new search engine tactics quickly, somehow figuring out how to do this while at the same time focusing on other tactics to sell a product or service. Proper website design and copy pulls the search engines to your site, allowing them to properly index your site.
In my previous day’s blog, “What Are the Most Important SEO Techniques for 2016?” I mentioned how content is still very important to our daily existence as a business on the web. Now let’s talk about providing really great content. This is the first tip.
Design Great Web Content for SEO
To provide great content, we have to create content that relates directly to your keywords and speaks to your audience as if they are friends. While having a nice “chat” with your friends, use relevant keywords in your copy. Target your audience by using keywords that they would be searching for. Remember, they may be searching for “how to make a logo”, not just “logo maker”. Don’t repeat keywords too often. They should be included as though you are speaking naturally, not as though you’re cramming in as many keywords as possible (aka “spamming the search engines”). Use only a few important, researched keywords; don’t try to shove them all in one page!
Remember, great content is about relating to your audiences’ concerns, answering their questions, and solving their problems so that, in turn, they will become lifelong fans of your product or service.
Build an Easy-to-Navigate Website
Focus on the anatomy of your page for quick navigation: Obvious but simple headers, an easily accessible and organized navigation bar and clickable images that link to more information about the image (that, let’s hope, has something to do with your product or service).
Make sure all your links work! How can a search engine crawl your site if broken links don’t allow them to flow through all the important areas of your site (besides the fact that Google will demote your site if it find lots of broken links)?
Finally, don’t overuse links from any one source, most certainly not from buying links. Google will penalize you immediately by de-ranking you (that’s right, you may no longer find yourself listed anywhere)!
Build a Sitemap
Speaking of the search engines being able to crawl your site, having a site map on your website will also assist them in reading your site in an organized fashion, giving your site an extra boost as far as ranking goes. Believe me, you want Google’s spiders to find all of your important pages so that you can be ranked higher than your competitor.
You can create a Google sitemap by using a free online sitemap generator (such as XML-sitemaps).
Make a Mobile-Responsive Website
In yesterday’s blog, “What Are the Most Important SEO Techniques for 2016”, I mentioned that making your website mobile-friendly is super important. This is because it’s one of the factors Google considers when ranking your site.
This is what I’d do: Make certain your web designer understands the nuances that go into mobile-readiness. Clarify which programming languages work, which ones don’t and which ones have work arounds.
As far as web design for SEO goes, it’s important that your website looks and works just as well on a mobile device as it does on one’s desktop computer. This will insure that you’ll get your share of traffic from mobile users, which increases the chances that Google will rank your site higher.
Use High-Quality Graphics and Images
Create attractive graphics for your audience. Quality images will keep visitors on your site for longer, therefore keeping your “bounce rate” down and your search engine rank up. A bounce rate is equivalent to the number of visitors who come to your site only to leave almost immediately. That’s right, just because you get them to come doesn’t mean they’ll stay. Of course, part of this is about whether you have the content they were looking for. Let’s assume you sell discount women’s shoes. Lucky for you, that is just what your visitor is looking for.
However, if your visitor doesn’t have a good feeling about the authenticity of your site or finds it less than professional, that visitor will leave right away and find your competition instead.
Spend some time improving the graphics on your site.
The good news here is that Laughingbird Software lets you affordably create your own visual content… and you can get it done easily and quickly!
Finally, tomorrow will be the last day of my SEO blog series. Come back and discover a simple look at 5 Types of Visual Content for Great SEO.
