How to Properly and Efficiently Optimize Your Website for SEO

In today’s crowded online world, a website that’s not optimized for SEO may as well not exist. Unless a customer is specifically searching for your business using your exact URL, a lack of optimization will cause you to lose business and provide diminishing returns for any investments you do decide to make in your website. Poor SEO causes you to miss out on a huge net of potential customers and clients for your business.

Therefore, it’s absolutely critical that you work to optimize your website in every way you can. However, you should not go into this process unaware of what to do. To better understand how to go about this, here are some tips on how to properly and efficiently optimize your website for SEO.

Choose Keywords That Matter

One important aspect of ranking on search engines is choosing to focus on keywords that your customers are actually searching for. You don’t want to spend time writing articles and developing features that cater to a certain keyword that doesn’t produce any hits and won’t give you any tangible results for your efforts. It’s crucial, therefore, that you research keywords that are relevant to the focus of your website so that you can make the most of everything you do on your website.

To start your keyword research, make a list of all of the keywords or phrases that are relevant to your site. While some of these terms will be obvious, you may need to think a little bit outside the box for others. At this phase, you don’t need to cross anything off of your list, so write down anything and everything. Consider grouping different keywords by topic to better focus on your ideas.

Next, you will want to research some of these search terms to see if the results are relevant to what your website is about. Eliminate any of the terms that are too off-base for you and lead to irrelevant sites or industries. In your hunt for the right keywords, look at what keywords your competitors are ranking well for. Once you have a list of keywords you want to pursue, use a tool like Google Adwords to cut your list down to relevant, attainable keywords for you to optimize on your site. Keep in mind that your keywords may shift and change over time as you better understand your target audience and adjust what your company does.

Make it Mobile-Friendly

Given that over half of web traffic originates from a mobile device, making your website mobile-friendly is one of the most important SEO optimizations that you can undertake. Depending on what your site is about and what the focus is, you may get more than half of your traffic from mobile users.

When search engines rank websites, they look for websites that are mobile-friendly, since they want to provide the best experience for their customers. Optimizing your website for a mobile audience doesn’t have to be difficult, as many website creation tools allow you to create a mobile site alongside your main site. You can preview it to see how it looks before you make any changes permanent. You may choose to make your website responsive instead of mobile. This means that your site design will adjust to whatever platform or device it is accessed from. There are benefits to using both mobile and responsive websites. Once you work on your site you may find that one option works better with your site builder platform and how your site is laid out.

Include Keywords Early

If you’re looking to capitalize on the effectiveness of keywords, then it’s important to include them early in your content. This includes placing them naturally in your headlines, in meta descriptions, and among the first few words of the main body of content. You may even want to include them in your URLs for specific pages. On the other hand, while you want to be sure your keywords are present in key locations, you want to avoid keyword stuffing, which can cause your website’s ranking to plummet.

When including keywords, particularly keywords with hyperlinks, the content should look as organic as possible. Never force the use of a keyword on your site. If the keyword is being forced unnaturally, this could be a sign that the keyword is not appropriate for that particular page. If it is appropriate, work on building quality content around the use of that keyword. Again, never overuse a keyword or use the same hyperlink repeatedly on the same keyword on a single page. Consider dispersing your links and keywords evenly throughout your website on the pages where they fit best.

Make Some Friends

It’s one thing to promote your brand on your own website. If you can get other brands and social media influencers to promote your brand, though, your website will experience a nice boost in search engine rankings. These kinds of organic links carry a lot of clout with search engines.

Linking your website to other reputable sites through backlinks can help to improve your reputation and help your company grow. Of course, before you can grow your brand in this manner, it’s important to create a viable and desirable brand on your own. Keep in mind the type of brands you feel comfortable partnering with and endorsing. Strive to get your brand up to par with that level.

Once you do have other brands and people linking to you, this will be a great source of organic traffic to your website.

For some people, the idea of SEO is so complex that they simply throw up their hands and walk away. It’s important to understand that though answers to proper SEO may be difficult to discover at times, there are answers to questions regarding improving your specific SEO needs. By getting a better handle on what makes SEO tick, you’ll be better prepared to find these answers for yourself. Consider working with a digital marketing provider or SEO professionals to properly optimize your website and get better visibility online.