How To Get Your Website Seen On Search Engines
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the best way to get your website seen on search engines like Google and Bing. If people can’t find you, they won’t know how much your business has to offer them. If you think about it, if you don’t use updated SEO practices and work to provide the best experience to your audience that you can, they’re going to miss out. Then you’ll miss out.
You can do a lot right now to make your SEO better, and some of it quickly. These 17 tips will make a huge difference in how SEO is working for you to get more traffic, convert more customers and generate more income.
How Do I Get My Website Found On Google And Other Search Engines?
1. Responsive Is Required
A responsive website, also called mobile friendly, means that your website needs to work and
look great no matter what device your customer is using. If someone is looking at your website on their phone while waiting for a doctor’s appointment and it won’t work on their device, they won’t go find you later on their PC. Plus, Google prioritizes responsive websites over ones that aren’t.
2. Keep Content Focused
When you first start writing content, keep it super-laser-focused on only one problem, issue, or topic at a time. This will make it a lot easier to create content for your website that will provide your audience with what they are looking for. When you’re done posting the most laser-focused content you can work on broader content if you want to. But, the more focused your content, the more people and search engines will be attracted to it.
3. Understand Your Keyword Metrics
It’s important to keep track of how the keywords you are using perform. The best way to do this is to use Google Analytics. Write down the information about the traffic and response you’re getting before you start and then 30 days later and at least every 90 days thereafter, to find out how the keywords you’ve picked are performing.
4. Get Inbound Links
In the old days, people did a lot of sneaky things to get inbound links. These are links from other websites to your website. Today, the only inbound links that help get your website seen on search engines are “do-follow” links from authoritative websites.
5. Use Software
There are many choices, but the best one to use for SEO on your site (if you use WordPress) is Yoast SEO. This plugin, when upgraded to the paid version, will help you in numerous ways to ensure that you’re doing everything to get your website seen on search engines.
6. Improve Your Technology
How fast your site loads, how the plugins you use work together, even your web host, can make a huge difference in whether your website gets more traffic or not. You want your site to load fast, and you want everything to work without a hitch so no one bounces off.
7. Keep Up with What’s New in SEO
Every few months (sometimes weeks), something about what works in terms of SEO changes. It changes because Google’s job is to deliver excellent content to their users. To accomplish that, they do everything they can to eliminate websites they or their users view as spam or a waste of time.
8. Optimize Page Titles
Each page of your website should have a unique page title. The title should describe what they’re going to find inside when they click, using as few words as possible without overstuffing it with keywords. Keywords should be in the first three words.
9. Check Search Engine Crawlability
You can use a website indexing tool like RankSider.com or SEOSiteCheckup.com to help you discover whether your website is crawlable or not. There are numerous services which will help you find out, plus some of them tell you what to fix if necessary. If your robot.txt file (a text file on your website that instructs search engine robots how to crawl and index pages on your website) is set up wrong or accidentally set up to block search engines, they’ll let you know.
10. Make URLs Easy to Read and Understand
Don’t use strange website URLs for content that you want to be found. Instead, use straightforward URLs that aren’t too long. The right URLs will improve search rank as well as make them friendlier to your audience.
11. Get Local When Relevant
If you want to attract local people to your website, remember to use local search terms and local words within URLs, menus, categories, and subcategories to make it clear to users and search engines.
12. Improve Meta Descriptions
Create a different description for every single page of your website that describes that page. Also, don’t forget to add in the alt-tag description information for every image that you put on your website.
13. Image Names
When you name an image for your site, don’t give it a number but rather name it by what’s in it. Naming an image something like “bluebutteflycover” is a lot better for search engines than giving it an arbitrary number.
14. Include a Sitemap
Yoast SEO will help you create a sitemap automatically. If you don’t use that, find a way to create a sitemap that is Google friendly so that your website can ensure that the bots crawl your site and don’t miss anything important. Also, if you make the sitemap available to users, they may be able to find things that they wouldn’t otherwise.
15. Know Your Competition
This may seem like a weird tip about getting your website seen on search engines, but your competition also uses SEO tactics like these. You can study their site using software like iSpionage.com, to find out what words they’re using so that you can get ideas for more keywords.
16. Avoid Duplicate Content Issues
The way to avoid duplicated content on your website is to use canonical link elements (a ‘preferred’ version of a page) to tell the search engine which page is the main one, and to set up the page you don’t want to be searched as no-index.
17. Use Breadcrumbs
This is easy to set up in the site settings with self-hosted WordPress sites. The reason you want breadcrumbs is that these barely noticeable links allow your users to find themselves around based on where they are, and it gives more links to follow for the search engine bots.
Free Checklist: Get Your Website Seen On Search Engines
These SEO tips can make a lot of difference on how to get your web page to the top of Google and other search engines. And how easy it is for your users to use it. After all, being found isn’t going to matter if your users can’t navigate and understand your website.
Without search engine optimization (SEO) you’re just hoping that Google and the other types of search engines will somehow stumble across your website, figure out what your content is all about, and then hopefully send relevant and targeted traffic to your website.
You’ve put a lot of work into your website so it makes no sense to just pray for luck where traffic and success is concerned. For more tips on getting your website seen on search engines download my free checklist, SEO For Beginners.