By now the word (or rather acronym) SEO should be a recurring part of your website vocabulary.
As an SME (Small & Medium Enterprise) owner, your website may be the first and most important impression your potential customers will have of your business. But it doesn’t require an ‘SEO expert’ to ensure your website turns up on Google.
Just follow these SEO tips to get a promising head-start.
1. Your website must serve your customers first, not search engines. Stop agonizing over keywords. When you cater to your customers, the search engines will follow. Write what’s useful for your customers and the search engines will follow.
2. Use only 1 main keyword for each web page that you are creating. If your web page is about handcrafted bags, this keyword “handcrafted bags” must be used in the headline, content, captions and call-to-action. You may use other keywords on this web page but try your best to stick to the main keyword.
3. Your web page must have its own title and description in order to rank well. You need to take some time to brainstorm titles and description but ensure you use your main keyword at the beginning of the page title as well as within the page description. Using the same page title across all pages of your website will not score any brownie points with search engines and that’s why most websites fail miserably when it comes to SEO.
4. Don’t try to con Google by stuffing your main keyword all over your web pages.
5. When you create web pages, ensure your page URLs are easy for search engines to understand what the pages are about. For example, www.soupqueen.net/chinese/radishsoup.htm is preferred over www.soupqueen.net/folder1/569123.htm
6. Check your website navigation structure. Make sure website users can easily find what they want with the least number of clicks.
7. Avoid having chunks of text saved as a graphic. To search engines, this is an image and totally “unreadable”. When it is “unreadable”, it is as good as not having any text on your web page.
8. Re-name your photos and include your main keyword in the re-named photo when you do so. This helps immensely as people are more likely to search for images on Google as well.
9. Ensure you are found on social media (Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn) and on Google Map. It matters greatly that you are found on Google’s assets. Of course, being active is also important – keep your social media pages updated daily but if that’s too hectic, at least twice a week!
10. Promote your website URL on all outgoing marketing materials. This includes email signature, company letterhead, banners, signboards, flyers, brochures, t-shirts and more!
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