Website Optimization Strategies

I’ve written a lot about SEO and optimization in general, and here is one more related post since I often get questions on what I’ve done to get such a high search engine ranking. Like my last post, I wanted to provide you some statistics to help illustrate why these are important.

Ample Pages and Content

It is important to have more than just a few pages to ensure that your site is indexed well. The reality is that websites with lots of content (and changeable content) will do better in the searches, one reason why blogs are such an advantage. Moreover, it is important to make it easy for customers to give you their information through forms on your website. Pages with conversion forms are the best way to turn your visitors into leads. Make sure you are providing easily accessible ways for your visitors to contact you, be it forms, chat, and contact information.

Businesses with 31 to 40 pages get 7X more leads than those with only 1 to 5.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Every web page has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and blogs. Of course, whether a page draws traffic (and links) depends on whether it’s optimized and how useful and interesting it is. Optimizing your content is a key step to ensure you give your content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web.

46% of daily searches are for research on products or services. The more pages you have, the better chance you have of ranking high.
60% of all organic clicks go to the top three organic search results. You can achieve one of those spots by optimizing your page titles.
75% of users never go further than the first page of search results. Compelling page descriptions can help you stand out.
89% of US internet users search online before they make a purchase, even when the purchase is made at a local business.

Search engines look for new content, which they index for potential queries. If they don’t index it, results won’t show it. The more new content you create, the more often search engines will come back looking for more.

Page Titles and Descriptions

As I have posted about before, the page titles and descriptions are very important for SEO. These should be unique to each page, and the company name should not be featured first (as is often done by inexperienced designers). Remember that the first word in a page title is given the most weight (or importance) by Google. Use something other than your company name to ensure a top ranking for your targeted keywords.

Inbound Links

The more sites that link to you, the better you will rank. By sharing good content you’ll keep moving closer to the top of the rankings; but remember, it’s not enough to just get links from other sites – those sites need to be viewed as trustworthy and authoritative, too.

Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links than those that don’t. Creating quality content is the key to getting inbound links.

ALT Tags for Images

I’ve posted about this before, but since this is one of the important SEO considerations, here is a bit more. It is important to include “alt” tags (a mouse-over description) with your images. This is needed for ADA Accessibility, and it helps with SEO by allowing you to add descriptive keywords (yet don’t keyword stack). And be sure to check all of your pages, each page needs to be optimized individually.

301 Redirect

To a search engine, “https://yoursite.com” and “https://www.yoursite.com” are not the same. Set up a permanent redirect (also known as a “301 redirect”) so that you don’t get penalized for having duplicate content, and a consequent lower search engine ranking. And while we’re on the subject of duplicates, NEVER cloak your domain. I had assisted a client recently who had 3 separate domains linked to the same website, and since they were cloaked the search engines viewed each as a copy. This resulted in a very low search ranking (spamming content penalty) and the directories didn’t know which domain to link to, so each would choose a different one, Site A, Site B, or Site C. Thankfully I was able to improve the site’s search ranking after I made one site primary and added 301 redirects for the other two domains.

Mobile

Having a website that displays well on mobiles devices is becoming more and more important. As of 2019, 96% of American adults have a smartphone and 87% of smartphone owners access the internet on their mobile devices regularly. When mobile optimizing your site, you want to take into account smaller screen sizes and slower bandwidths. This means using web optimized mages and adjustable font sizes, and thinking about how much content is displayed on a single page..

Another important considerations of mobile is the need to use the “meta viewport” tag, and to have “Apple Icons”. For Apple Icons you need:

The meta viewport tag tells a mobile device how to orient a page when it’s loaded. It also determines if a page can be scaled larger or smaller and if it should rotate as the user rotates their mobile device.

Analytics

Measuring your successes (and failures) is the only way to know what marketing activities are working for you. If you can’t measure how many visits, leads and customers your different campaigns generate, you need to reevaluate how you’re measuring your activities.

The data to look for when tracking is: