SEO, The famous Search Engine Optimization term. What is it and what does it really mean? Well, SEO is the most important thing to consider when designing and building a website. If you haven’t noticed, a company named Google runs the Internet and it’s either you follow their ways or it’s the highway!
When someone goes online and looks for something, they go straight to Google (or another search engine) to find what they’re looking for. If your website doesn’t come up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you probably are not going to get much traffic to it.
Now, if you build a website and don’t properly optimize it, don’t even bother building it. The only people who are going to be viewing it are the 10 people who know your domain name.
The purpose of having a website is to get views and people to see it. It is your showroom window for the online universe! Yes, you want to make it look its best, but if you don’t follow the best optimization practices, it’s like it’s hidden in a back alley where no one can find it.
So what can be done to optimize a website?
1. Content, Content, Content … did I mention Content? The copy you put in your website should truthfully tell what your company does and why it is beneficial to a potential customer. Make sure that content is put into the website as HTML text, not solely in fancy Flash images. No matter what the experts say, search engines can’t read Flash images (at least not right now).
When writing the copy to your website¸ do keyword research. Use tools for free like Google Keyword Research tool and paid tools such as Wordtracker. These sites will tell you what keywords people are using when they are searching for things your offer. Then incorporate those words in your text, title tags (what you see on the top of your web browser) and meta descriptions. (A developer will know what that is). Don’t keyword stuff, though. Write copy as if you are writing a letter, make it natural and don’t add unnecessary words and terms. It will hurt you in the long run from getting found on the search engines.
2. Include a blog on your website. Blogs have a lot of great benefits and SEO is one of them. Search engines like Google LOVE fresh content. If your last post was in 2008 it looks like you haven’t been open for business since then. A blog help keeps your company top-of-mind and current to search engines so when a person or business is in need of your product or service, they know where to go.
Creating a blog is very simple for a web developer to add to a website. Here are a few tips to make your blog the very best:
- Blog as often as possible. But make sure you blog good useful information so users come back to it.
- Give users ways to share your blog on their social networks and create an RSS feed for it so users that sign up for your blog get new content to their RSS reader automatically. (All things a web developer should be able to do).
There are many, many other factors in properly ptimizing a website, but these ideas will help you get started getting ranked with the search engines. Happy surfing!