85% – 90% of traffic to your website will probably come from search engines so it’s very important that you do everything to make sure people can find you and/or your business when using search tools such as Google or Bing search engines.
Here are some common sense tips to give your website the best possible chance of appearing high within search results:
- Understand what your potential customers/clients will search for to find your product/service
- Make quality content a priority
- Structure page content using – h1, h2, h3, p, ul, ol, dd, etc
- Title, keywords, descriptions relevant to each page (search engines index pages within your website)
- Use and link keywords and phrases within page content
- Keep away from highly competitive keywords and phrases
- Put content, structure and usability over design
- Remember, “site navigation is great for humans”, keep machines in mind when building your website
- Exchange links with external complimentary websites
- Keep your website content regularly updated
- Use PDFs, PPT, Doc, Excel (search engines are able to read these common file type)
- Make sure content of images are described in alt tags
- Website code is important (make sure your website is accessible by machines too)
- Read your web stats / visitor’s log (also get feedback from your clients)
- Don’t to trick search engines – they don’t do like it
- Stay away from anyone offering you machine optimisation SEO service
- Content (meaningful and useful) is king
That’s it. Simple right?
Oh and by the way, register your business with search engines – it’s free.