Anyone can build a website –but how will people know it’s there?
If you build it they will come doesn’t work in the digital world. You need to market your site and let people know it’s there.
It needs to be found on search engines like Google and Bing.
How? You can buy your way into search results with an ad, or you can design a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign to improve your site’s ranking in organic search results.
Focus on “crawlability.” Search engines send out called web crawlers that regularly visit your site and try to understand your content. Help the crawlers find pages on your site and make sure they can understand what they’re seeing.
Here are five tips to get your site started in the right direction:
- Keywords. What words do the people you want to visit your site use to look for you? Use those keywords in the first few words of your page title as it is the most important part of the page from a search engine’s perspective.
- Use Google Analytics. It’s free and super easy to use. It will tell you how people are using your site and where that traffic is coming from.
- Content, content, content. Posting good content, and keeping up fresh is really important. Search engines gravitate to blogs, which are regularly updated. Just be sure the content is what your visitors need to know, or find most useful.
- Include a sitemap page. This helps search engines find every page in your website. And, use those keywords descriptions of each page.
- Use text. Search engines can’t read images, PDFs or animated links like Flash. So keep it simple.