Every online based business strives to achieve a high amount of traffic and thus increase the number of customers. Search engine optimization is the name for a number of techniques that are used to give your site a better ranking with search engines. While it's possible to optimize an already existing website, it's much better to integrate necessary SEO components into the site design. While it might be hard to achieve the perfect balance between visitor usability and optimization for search engine visibility, it's not impossible. Here are some useful tips on how to successfully implement SEO on your website.

Importance of URL

When coming up with URL name for your website, you should always make sure that it clearly indicates the content or service you're offering. Google recommends that you keep your URL structure short and simple, avoiding any unnecessary characters or terms. That way both your visitors and the search engine will know exactly what your page offers.

Our example of bad URL isn't SEO friendly because the search engine won't know what that page is about. For multi-word URL's always avoid using underscores and use hyphens instead.

Websites with Implemented Social Media Rank Better

With social media on the constant rise, it's becoming imperative to implement social media within your website design if you want to improve your rank. Include all the icons for Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest in your website design and you will rank much higher with search engines. This, in turn, will directly increase your traffic, not to mention that your visitors will also be happy that your website is social media friendly. While you can rely on having good content that's likely to be shared, it's always better to go a step further and make sharing it as easy as possible.

Site Navigation

Good navigation is imperative for any website's success. If a visitor has to think too much once he lands on your site, he might as well leave. It is of the essence to make things as clear as possible so that your visitors can find what they're looking for within two clicks. Experience taught us that the best place to put your menu is at the top of the page, or vertically in the lower left corner of the page. Dropdown menus are fine for people but don't work well with robot visitors. Ideally, you'll want to have text links on your main page leading to your most visited content.

Be Mobile-Friendly

It's 2017, the age of smartphones, so it's only natural that the largest number of searches comes from mobile phones. For example, if your site is designed completely in JavaScript, search engines will have a hard time reading it, which will cause crawling issues. Not to mention that JavaScript doesn't work very well on mobile devices. It's an absolute must to have a mobile-friendly design which will maximize results from a mobile search. You have three main options, but you should really only go with Responsive Web Design and forget about the other two. Not only that Google recommends it, which means it's best optimized for its search engines, but it's also a single site that adapts and changes its layout to fit the device it's being viewed on.

SEO Experts

It's no surprise that most of the pages that do reach the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) are being managed by SEO professionals. You may have a great website, but if the traffic results aren't there - it just doesn't matter. Hire a professional to do a thorough SEO audit and highlight the holes in your current SEO setup. Consider hiring a company like SEO Company Perth to do everything for you, from audit to copywriting services and link building. SEO is changing on daily basis, and keeping up with it can be extremely time-consuming unless you're paid to do so. Also, consider that you'll save money that you'll have to pay for SEO software tools on a monthly basis.

Image Optimization

A substantial amount of traffic can be achieved through the smart use of Image SEO. If you search for a term through Google you'll see that a couple of images will always pop up on the top of the page. Those images can then lead you to a site, making it a lot of traffic in turn. It's essential to get that image optimization right and it will only take a couple of minutes to do it right. For example, you may optimize images for WordPress, which could make a huge difference in your monthly traffic, especially if you multiply it with your entire gallery of images. The simplest way to achieve this is a simple, accurate description of what's going on in the photograph. For example "Tumbleweed in the desert", or "Storm over Florida".

Conclusion

If you wish to remain competitive on the internet improving your SEO must be on your priority list. It's simple, you want to appear as high in the search rankings as possible when people hit that search button, and good SEO can really make the difference. It's also worth mentioning that internet users perceive the first page hits as relevant and credible, which is how you want your webpage to appear. Think about it, would you rather sell your product in the middle of the desert, or in Manhattan? Yeah, well, the first two pages on search engines are the Manhattan in this story. So start tweaking your SEO, and see how your business grows.