Online businesses are faced with the pressing need to fare well in
Google SERPs, considering Google controls more that 90% of the search
traffic in the U.S. alone. However, contrary tom popular belief, SEO is
not a process that follows the website design & development phase.
Rather, it should be an integral force right from the start of the web
design project.
Here are some simple SEO tweaks that you can
incorporate directly into your website design:
1. Include a Blog
Search
engines love fresh content! And blogs the best and easiest way to feed
them with fresh content on regular basis. In addition to the distinct
SEO advantage, blogs also prove to be a platform to visitors to leave
comments and voice their opinion. In addition, if users choose bookmark
your blog posts or share them on social networks, your content gets
tremendous exposure on the web.
2. Add Google Analytics
Google
Analytics is a free analytics software package that can provides
critical data about the website and its performance in search engines.
It has a variety of features like Goal Tracking, Event Tracking, bounce
rates and Intelligence which informs you about specific keywords, search
engines and traffic sources. This will help you evaluate the
effectiveness of various avenues and optimization strategies after which
you can formulate plans to improve the website in the future.
3.
Clean your Code
Add all scripts and CSS files as external files.
This not only reduces the code-to-content ratio but it takes lesser
time for search engine spiders to find the actual content.
4.
Include Rich Original Content
Google ranks the relevance of a
website according to the quality of content it contains. The content
should not only be relevant but also original by virtue. Content of a
web page should not have been replicated anywhere else on the web lest
it leads to the issue of duplicate content.
5. Use Meta Tags
Meta
tags as they appear in the search results, inform users about the
overview of what the website is all about. So make sure you write a
snappy meta description that compels visitors to click on the result.
Google also uses meta tags to differentiate web pages, so make sure you
write unique meta descriptions for each page of your website. If you
want to improve the click-through rates, include info about free offers,
guarantees and a phone number as well.
6. Avoid Repetition in
the Web Copy
Unique content is the most vital element for the SEO
of a website. Even though you may be tempted to include details such as
copyright text, contact details and company mission on all the pages of
the website, it is not SEO healthy because you run the risk of being
penalized for duplicate content. Therefore, avoid repeating any words
and phrases in your web content.
7. Add Footer Links
Cross
linking between the pages of a website with the target SEO keywords in
the anchor text provides an essential boost to the SEO efforts. However,
if you try to squeeze in keywords irrelevantly into your page layout,
it looks pretty unprofessional. That is why you can use footer links to
link between the various web pages, with the keywords you want to rank
for within the anchor text of the links.