If you are just starting out in online marketing, the first place you want to start is with the creation of a SEO-friendly website.
The more your website appears on search engine results pages the more traffic to your site, which means more local traffic to your business.Therefore, your website not only has to be functional and appealing, but the content has to be unique and extremely relative to your business, product or service.
Website Structures
The first portion of your website to take a look at for SEO quality is the actual structure itself. For instance, you probably use tabs or categories to list your services or products.
You can use optimized keywords to label your tabs and categories.
When you create buttons or links you can also use keywords that will be picked up by the search engines.
Take the example of the coffee shop again…
If you want to make your website flow better and more user-friendly, you could add a tab for the different types of coffee or espressos you offer.
You could also add another tab for the dessert pastries you make.
The point is that these “tabs” could be terms and keywords that you know coffee shop seekers would enter into a search engine.
The idea is to use your entire website, not just the articles or blogs posted, as a means to appear on a search engine results page.
If you use high-quality, relevant keywords and content on your website, your business will likely see an increase in popularity amongst online consumers.
However, it is important to note that “keyword optimization” does not mean “keyword stuff” – there’s a difference. You can “over-do” the process of using keywords in your website as well.
The search engines can identify this type of behavior and they don’t like it – meaning it hurts your rankings instead of help.
There’s a fine balance that you have to use when incorporating keywords into your website, so do so with caution if you want to see results.
Using SEO Quality Keywords
Keep in mind that when you are creating content for your website, it is important to include SEO quality keywords.
A keyword, as mentioned earlier, is the term that is used to refer to words that are most likely to be entered into a search engine.
These are the words that are going to determine whether or not your website pops up on search engine results pages.
While there is no magical list of keywords for your business, but they are fairly simple to determine based on your business itself and the searches that others frequently make.
Follow the Rules!
There are also some simple rules which you should consider while you are designing and adding content to your website if you really want to get the best results:
- When you create your website, make sure that you comply with W3C Standards.
Use CSS and XHTML for page mark up, as it will make the pages light and easier to download, keep in mind that no one wants to wait for your site when they can download the competition much faster.
If at all possible, try to make your website accessible via smartphone, as many people now surf through their phones.
The ability to access your site via mobile phone is important for those who search for local products and services while out on the go; these are the new customers that you want to generate.
- If possible, try to put the keywords in your domain name URL; for instance: newyorkcitylocalcarseller.com.
Don’t make it too bulky or complicated and make sure that your URL is related to your business.
Keyword rich domain names are great for search engine optimization and tend to rank more quickly.
If you already have a URL for your business, you can always create additional sites and put them up on keyword rich domains.
- Your website should have proper content to be indexed by web bots or spiders.
Try to add a sufficient amount of text to your website as the crawlers can only read text.
The more content, the better.
The text on your website will be scanned over for indexing in search engines, as a method of relevance and validation.
If you use images and videos in your website, be sure to name them as “keywords” so the search engines are able to read them as well.
- Make the titles and headings of your website appealing while using keywords.
The keyword should be used in the first header, which should also provide a description about the page.
Your headers should be related entirely to the content of your page and to your business; otherwise you will attract the wrong visitors to your site.
- Do not keyword-stuff your website.
Make sure that the keywords look natural in the text and do not just stuff them in where they make no sense to visitors.
Your keywords should be directly related to your business and should read naturally with the rest of your text.
- If you want the search engine spiders to index your webpage, place the sitemapfile.xml at the bottom of your page.
- Get quality backlinks to your website.
A “backlink” is a link back to your website from other websites.
Basically, this means putting a link to your website on other relevant websites.
You should try to get high-quality, relevant backlinks from high-authority websites back to your website for the most powerful impact.
