Website Optimization Tips
This post discusses a broad strategy for basic website optimization. The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to make sure that when search engine spiders find your website and rank it according to topic relevance, that it comes out ahead of other similar websites. The process of SEO is not a one time effort, but will require ongoing work, maintenance, and regular monitoring and testing to make sure your site holds its rank. This is a four-step process for search engine optimization that you can put to work on your website. Put it to work as a high level list of steps to follow.
1. Analyze Your Target Market Thoroughly
- Analyze websites Take the time to analyze all visible text, keywords and metasets, and code, and compare how you are positioned against other sites in your niche. – For example, how much code is on your site compared to theirs? How much code is on your site compared to text?
- Perform a competitive analysis Take the time to examine your keywords and the current rankings of websites that you’re in direct competition with to plan out a strategy. Choose the five best results in Google to start the process, then expand to more sites if you feel this is necessary.
- Initial Keyword Selection Choose a list of search terms to target based on your target demographic. Start with words that you would use in a search engine if you were trying to find your product, website, or service.
2. Keyword Research and Analysis
Work up a list of specifically targeted keywords and phrases. Spend time going over industry sources and lists of competitive keywords generated by keyword search tools. Use this starting list to figure out important information about search engine hits and estimate how many websites may be competing for traffic on each specific keyword phrase. Consider using long tail search phrases, plural keywords, singular keywords, and misspellings. Track where you start from with each keyword so that you have a clear assessment of your baseline traffic and ranking, so that you have an accurate assessment of how your site has grown in the future. It’s important to understand where you start so that you can clearly see how you’ve grown.
A spreadsheet is often the perfect tool for this tracking process. Set clear goals and objectives for how you’d like to grow your traffic in a specific period of time. Define any objectives that you have well in advance, before purchasing any products, tools, or programs. For example, you may want to attempt to increase your website traffic from a baseline of 100 to 200 visitors a day in thirty days. Or you may want to double your conversion rate over a specific length of time. There’s no way to know if you’ve been successful or not if you don’t take the time to track your metrics. Website optimization is important if you are looking to boost your company’s ranking on search engines. Local SEO is also a thing to consider when you are doing the website optimization.
3. Optimize Content and the Submission Process
Design eye-catching titles for pages. Choose titles that include your keywords, establish a theme for your page, and provide direction for your keywords. Create meta tags for your pages These description tags may influence your click-through rates, but they aren’t directly used for ranking your site. Google doesn’t use the keyword meta tag any longer. Add search terms strategically to your pages Include the keywords that you’ve chosen in your web content and your source code. Be sure to work with the industry guideline of including one to three keyphrases per content page, and add more pages as necessary to work through your entire list of keywords. Be sure that you use natural language to work in your keywords. This allows the search engine to easily understand what the page is about. Shorter pages used to be recommended, with 100 to 300 words per page.
Now, however, user testing is showing that pages with 800 to 2,000 words per page are steadily outperforming pages with shorter amounts of text. When it’s said and done, the marketplace and end users will make the final determination as far as a site’s ranking numbers and overall popularity. Work up new sitemaps for both Bing and Google This will help make it a simpler process for your website to be indexed. Create both HTML and XML versions of your page. Then submit them via Bing and Google webmaster tools submission pages. Take the time to submit your website to directories. Professional marketers often don’t bother to submit their actual URL to major search engines, but you can choose to do so if you’d like. It’s often better to link back to your site naturally, instead. These links will ensure that your site gets indexed by the search engines.
4. Measure and Test Continuously
Determine the effectiveness of any programs you’ve put into place by analyzing search engine rankings, web traffic, and the performance of your individual keywords. Test the results of any changes that you make, and keep track of these changes so you know how they affect your rankings. It’s crucial that you add and modify website content and keywords on a regular basis, working to continually improve your search engine rankings. This helps keep your site growing and makes sure that it doesn’t stall or stagnate. Make sure that your outbound and inbound links stay current and relevant, as well. A blog will help you keep the ongoing content addition and structure that you need to keep your website traffic flowing. Often, your hosting company can assist you to install or set up a blog, if you need help.
Website Optimization Experts
We are available to help you with your website optimization. We are an experienced and top-rated online marketing agency in Houston, TX. Call us today at (832)230-4495. Do not miss out on potential clients by missing one very important step which is website optimization. SEO Houston Pros can help improve the overall performance of your website. We are only a call away.
Leave a Reply