Search engine optimization (SEO) is the term used for a variety of processes and tools that help ensure that your website is found and hopefully is on the first page of any search engine listing for certain words. An entire industry has emerged as part of the Internet revolution. There is one thing that many of these companies have in common. They make the whole process more confusing than necessary and charge large amounts of money from the customer, who then becomes dependent on them. The tips below will get you up at least a couple of steps on the ladder to a high-performing website. These tips are not exhaustive, but at least they will start to bring visitors to your site.

Tip 1 Website content

You just need to look at any random website and this point is extensively illustrated. The text you use should be visitor-friendly. A visitor wants to see that you are searching fairly quickly. If you are looking for a widget manufacturer, the last thing you want to know is all the machinery that the company has that is used to make the widgets. If you ask “so what” when you have read a website, the website owners have not understood you. Any website must offer benefits for the potential customer. The customer widget itself wants to know what color it can get it in, not how they do it. With this in mind, your website copy shouldn’t just be about what you do, but what it can do for the customer.

Tip 2 Research keywords and phrases

Ask yourself what search terms people will put into search engines like Google to find you. This is the foundation of all search engine optimization. You should follow a few simple rules and identify which ones are the most important to you. Keyword suggestions can be found using the Google Keyword Tool. But don’t be tempted to choose keywords that are the most popular. First, those keywords may be the hardest to optimize for, and second, they may not accurately reflect your product or service. Google helpfully provides an indication of a keyword’s competitiveness, and a keyword with less competition may be more appropriate.

Tip 3 Include relevant keywords in your text

To make sure your site is more relevant, include keywords in your text. One caveat here. You shouldn’t be too repetitive with keywords just to rank higher. As we have seen, you must write your text for the people who read it and not for the search engines. You can also have different keywords on the same page or different keywords on different pages. This will ensure that every page is optimized, not just the home page.

Tip 4 Call to action

Ask yourself a question once you’ve read a website page. “What do you want me to do now?” Many websites are beautifully written and have well-designed graphics, but then they fail to close the deal. That deal can be to get the potential customer to click on another page or even to buy something. That is why it is very important to have a strong call to action on every page. This call to action can be anything from “call now” to “buy now for a free gift” and so on. The goal of a website is to attract someone and then get them to do something else.

Tip 5 Keep navigation simple

Today, people generally have short attention spans or are impatient because time is precious. You will hear variations on a theme of the following statement, but typically when someone lands on your site, they have around 12 seconds to capture it. If they don’t immediately see what they want or have to search through the layers of the website, they will leave and your competitors will benefit. As a general rule of thumb, no more than three clicks should get someone where they need to go to get the information they are looking for. It goes without saying that if you optimize a page for a particular keyword or phrase and someone searches for that phrase, they should land on the correct page and not the home page, where they will have to search for what they want.

Tip 6 Use title tags and alternate tags

When you do a search on Google or another search engine, a website name and some other text will be returned to you. The text used comes from the title tags. By default, many websites include something like “Welcome to our website” or similar. However, a better approach would be to include some of your main keywords. And it is perfectly acceptable to include only keywords and not form a sentence. You should also keep the company name at the end of the title tags and not at the beginning. All of this means that when someone searches for your keywords, the list will include a title with the keywords they were looking for and this will encourage them to click on your link.

Alt labels are the text messages you see when you hover over an image or graphic. It is necessary to describe your graph in this way, as Google cannot “see” the graphs and will therefore regard them as uninteresting blanks. Again, including keywords in your Alt tags will further improve your ranking.

Tip 7 Update regularly

There is nothing worse than seeing a last updated date from many years before. This says that the company can’t be bothered to keep it up to date. If this is the case, why should it interest the customer? Regular updating is essential for ranking. The more you update your site, the more often Google will come back and the more often it happens, the higher your ranking will be. This does not necessarily mean that you have to change your entire website. However, it is worth renewing it regularly. One way to update your site regularly is to include a news feed or blog. This will allow you to change the content of the site without consuming too much time.

Tip 8 Create links

Linking to other sites both inbound and outbound is an important part of optimization. The more traffic comes from external sites, the better your ranking will be. This means not just trying to get reciprocal links, but other activities that can be very profitable. Some of the newer approaches include social media. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, among many others, can be used to enhance your brand, but also to encourage people to visit your site. Once you’ve built up a following, especially among your target customer base, bidding or offering some other incentive through these means can often result in increased traffic.

Another way to do this is to write articles like this one on your subject of expertise. Including a link to your website with more information will guarantee more clicks. There are many free press release sites that you can submit your release to for distribution. Again, clicks can be obtained through links to more information on your site.

Tip 9 Add Google Analytics

If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it! All of these tips will lead to changes in the number and types of visits to your site. But how do you know if it’s working and how do you know what else to do to improve your SEO? There are many tools available now that will allow you to see how many visits you get on each page, the conversion from query to action, which keywords are important, and much more. One of them is Google Analytics, which is free code generated on Google’s website for you to include on every page of your website. This allows the software to track what is happening and gives you the results in terms of a regular report. Reviewing this report regularly will help you make changes that will improve your site and possibly improve the visitor’s journey through your site.

Tip 10 Add newsletter / download registration

How do you capture the details of the prospects who visit your site? One way is to write a regular newsletter, perhaps with offers or important information. Visitors can sign up to receive this newsletter from your site. Similarly, you can write articles, articles, or other documents relevant to your industry, technology, or market that you can offer free to visitors in exchange for their email address and other details. This is useful in two ways. First, you can use the data to create a database for your newsletters and offers, etc. Second, you can use the information to drive our segmentation of your market, allowing you to precisely target your messages to different groups to make them more relevant.

In the world of SEO there are no guarantees and time consuming, but the results will be worth it. Also be patient, as it will take a while for your site to climb the rankings. And finally it continues like this. Good SEO requires persistence above all else.