If you own a website you have probably heard the phrase Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). According the dictionary, SEO is “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.” Rare is a website owner that doesn’t want to achieve that, right?

But how does it work? All search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) list web pages in the free or organic section of the Search Engine Results Page by what would be the best or most relevant results for users’ searches (see “3 Ways That Google Keeps Your Using Google”). What is taken into account when the decision is made which pages to list are many factors, and that criterion is changed all the time.

If you can hire an SEO team to work on your website that’s great, but many small businesses don’t have a budget for that. However, the good news is that there are some very basic things you can do to give your site (or blog) a better chance of being ranked by Google.

 

5 SEO Tips for your Website

 

None of these are “sure fire” SEO tactics to get more Google love for your website (far from it), but by following these five tips, your website pages will have a better chance to receive more Google love than they would otherwise:

 

1. Check The Speed: Make sure your website opens fast (if it’s slow, contact your host and see what they can do to speed it up).

 

2. Check Every Page and Link: Make sure all the features work properly, pages open seamlessly, and there are no broken links.

 

3. Publish Useful Content: Make sure the content on each page is informational and could be linked to from other websites as a reference (blog posts are especially good for this).

 

4. Easy To Use: Make sure that your website looks good, is easy to navigate, and feels safe for users, especially if you ask for personal information such as an email address or credit card information.

 

5. Domain Names: Be consistent with your domain names. If you type in your website this way mywebsite.com (without www) it should redirect to www.mywebsite.com. If not, search engines are seeing two different sites. If your site does not redirect, contact your developer.

 

Now that’s not too hard, right? It’s a start and I’ll be sharing more easy tips as time goes by so please subscribe so you don’t miss a thing!

 

- Betsy