SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION – A good first impression is one of the most important contributions to a company’s ability to be successful. Most often that first impression is your website, and if your prospective clients, existing customers, or potential employees can’t easily find it, you’re already not off to a good start.
To that end, the Business Examiner has created an overview of the most important things that you can do to make your website more visible, and increase its page rank so that visitors can easily learn more about your business.
But first, we need to know why?
- The organic links on the first page of Google receive 90% of web traffic for a specific search.
- The first organic link receives 33% of all traffic for a specific set of keywords.
- The top 3 organic links receive 61% of all online clicks for the search a user has typed in.
- Citations (NAD Listings).
- Google, Bing and Yahoo have their own form of a credit score. They are looking for a high volume of consistency between basic, critical pieces of information on your business. These include your business name, address, phone number, and ideally a company website.. The more citations that are exactly the same, the higher your website ranks in Google’s algorithm. Having more correct and consistent citations than your competitors can be the difference between a 1st and 2nd rank on Google.
- How many perfect citations do you need to ensure a strong online presence? 30-50 leading websites, and 5-10 industry specific websites.
- Page Optimization
- After your website has a clearly established “digital credit score” that Google decides is strong enough, your company’s website is evaluated next. This analysis looks at source code, link structure, link layout, metatags, word counts on each page, image loading times, page loading times, and much more.
- Just because a website looks good, does not mean that Google will rank it favorably. The only way to really know is to run your website through an evaluation tool. Email us to get your website evaluated within 24 hours.
- Content and Link creation.
- As Google, Bing and Yahoo’s search algorithms evolve, one consistency has begun to emerge, content is king. Once your website has established its digital credit score, and the back-end of your site has been cleaned up and optimized, the difference between first and second page, or even the top and bottom of the first page is content and high quality links between your site and others.
- Pages on your website relevant to the keywords your prospective customers are likely to be searching are critical to getting increasing your rank. These can be blog posts written specifically for your business that incorporate highly targeted keywords, or they can appear as a specific page focused on a unique product or service offering (think an auto repair shop with separate pages for oil changes, maintenance packages, and replacement parts).
- The final component is the creation of relevant links between your site and others. These can be in the form of having your website link incorporated in another company’s blog post, or installing code on the back-end of your site that incorporates your website into an SEO network. These networks can have 10s of thousands of websites with reciprocal link sharing that increases the page rank of your website.
If you’d like to know where your website stands in terms of any of the above information, send an email to BEDigital@businessexaminer.ca and a report will be available within 24 hours.
