Online businesses all face one common problem: how to get customers to find and visit their websites.
After all, if no one knows your business exists, you won’t be able to make any sales or generate profit. That’s why it’s crucial to optimize your website for search engines.
The process of search engine optimization (SEO) involves both on-page and off-page factors that are taken into consideration by major search engines like Google and Bing when ranking websites. Optimizing your website for search engines increases web traffic, builds brand awareness, generates leads, and ultimately boosts sales.
Here are 7 ways to optimize your website so that it is seen and ranked by search engines.
Free SEO Certification Course from the HubSpot Academy
How To Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
The tips below will help you optimize your website for search engines and increase free, organic traffic.
SEO isn’t an overnight process, but it’s worth investing time and resources into as the long-term benefits are immense.
If you take the steps outlined here, you’ll ensure that more people will discover your business online and will be more likely to visit your website.
1. Utilize Targeted Keywords
Using targeted keywords on webpages, blogs, and other content pieces will help search engine robots discover and index your website more easily. They also ensure that users find relevant information when using a specific keyword or phrase in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Create Valuable Content
Crafting good content is imperative for SEO visibility. Search engines analyze the relevance of each piece of content and its usefulness for readers. This is why it’s essential to produce high-quality content that is both informative and engaging and meets your target audience’s needs or wants.
3. Optimize Your Images
Optimizing images’ size and file name helps your website load faster, improving user experience and search engine rankings. Additionally, using descriptive words in the file name instead of generic terms like “IMG123” makes it easier for search engines to identify images.
4. Improve Page Speed
Page speed affects user experience, and due to that, it also affects search engine crawler activity. For example, if your website loads too slowly, users (and bots) will leave before they even read your content, and due to this, crawlers can’t access or index all its pages.
5. Build Internal Links
Internal linking helps spread link equity throughout your website by sending signals from high-ranking pages to lower-ranking ones. This strengthens the overall structure of your website and makes it easier for crawlers to discover new web pages.
6. Secure Your Website
A secure website is vital for visitors and search engines. An SSL certificate (Secure Sockets Layer) creates a secure link between your website and your visitor’s browser and prevents hackers from stealing private information such as credit card numbers, names and addresses. Without it, visitors won’t trust your website and will leave before they explore it, while Google won’t rank your pages in the SERPs.
7. Submit XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps help search engine robots understand a website’s structure and ensure its content is appropriately indexed. Submitting an up-to-date XML sitemap to the major search engines ensures that your pages are crawled regularly and accurately.
Free SEO Certification Course
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website to increase visibility on popular search engines such as Google and Bing. In this free SEO Certification Course from the HubSpot Academy, you’ll learn all things SEO, including website optimization, link building, keyword research, and much more.