Being a small business owner preparing to create your business website with great design is your priority but you should also know how to make your website SEO-friendly to compete with the current fierce competition. Having an SEO-friendly website is the first thing that is required to be successful in this world of e-commerce.
There are several things you need to take into account, but I have tried to summarize the most necessary and easy tips that you might be avoiding because of which your online business is not yielding the desired traffic and attention.
Not Having Responsive Website
A responsive website is the very first necessity, especially for local visitors, as it helps in better rankings in the mobile search which is incredibly necessary. As per research, for start-ups, 50% of customers find your business through a local search on mobile devices in a day and 78% of it results in offline purchases.
You can see the power of mobility that you might be missing in your websites. Your website needs to have a mobile-friendly design to make it accessible by mobile users. Responsive website design is accessed by desktop visitors, tablet visitors, and smartphone users with equal ease.
You do not have to create separate pages for different screen sizes but you have to select a responsive theme or template, which will ensure that it adjusts itself to fit on any screen size.
Haven’t Optimized Your Images
Probably you are not paying attention to optimizing your images. Yes, this is necessary for better SEO. You need to optimize your images with text for better search visibility. For this, you can rename your image’s file name adding particular keywords instead of leaving it with some digital and numeric name. This will place your page’s primary keywords in the filename of the image. You can also have alt text, which will be visible if the image is not loaded on the page and if someone hovers over the image. Creating a caption beneath your images will also help your visitors to know what it is. In a way, your images can also speak about your business.
Not Adding Important Information in Text Form
Although search engines crawl different natures of media, the text is the most desirable option search optimization. Considering this, you must include content on every page of your website. For this, you can create as small as 150-word product description. For your videos or audio also, don’t forget to add a text-based transcription.
You cannot even miss adding “SEO Title” and “Meta Description” for each page of your website to optimize it all. It should have unique and main keyword phrases. Most of the time, local businesses do not display their important information in texts but they rely only on images. But it is the guideline of Google Webmaster to use text instead of images to show necessary information. In addition, you can have some relevant text stating about your business in your URLs too.
Clumsy and Confusing Navigation Structure
Making a site with clear navigation structure and text links are yet another rule set by Google Webmaster Guidelines. Your website’s navigation structure might be confusing for your visitors. Better think of your website’s structure and create your link structure accordingly. You must come up with categories, subcategories, and the pages within each section. You must not go more than three levels deep with your navigation structure. Let your visitors reach the pages they want easily without much fuss. In addition, you must also create text links in the footer of your site for every primary page on your website.
Proper Redirections are Missing
In any website, you might be having some broken links, which needs to be redirected to relevant pages. If you have deleted any of your web pages for any reason the visitor will receive a 404 error message telling them the page no longer exists. For this, you need to redirect the old page link to any relevant new page. If not done, it will ultimately be removed from search results. Your Google Webmaster Tools will tell you in the Crawl Errors report which page links are leading to a Not Found (404) error. You must also update the permalinks on your website. Instead of ugly permalinks with numbers, you can update it to keyword optimized ones, then you can redirect all of the old URLs to the new ones.
Haven’t Optimize your Social Media Profiles
Of course, you might have ignored your social media profile also. You must make it as descriptive as possible. Provide details to ‘About’ or ‘Information’ sections of any social media platform using words that describe your business best. Most of the business often over the “Category” field on Facebook Pages but is important for Facebook mobile searches. You need to add your business category to it.
Hope this piece of information would help you create a website which is SEO-friendly but not just for search engines. Add relevant and interesting content to your website that attracts customers more than search engines. It will automatically attract search engines. You can also hire our SEO services in Fort Collins for professionally done SEO for your business.