For first let us warmly congratulate you on your new website! You are to be applauded for launching a new online-based business or for adding an online component to your already existing offline venture. And you also deserve a pat on the back for jumping on the bandwagon of the digital era and digital marketing in particular, which will bring you ample opportunities to generate leads and acquire digital conversions of clients.
So, since now you have the first step, which is launching your website, covered, please don’t sit back and relax thinking the rest will take care of themselves! On the contrary, of equal importance to having the site, is also the act of optimizing it for search engines. If you fail or neglect to do this, then the various search engines will not be facilitated for crawling your site and indexing its content. In turn this will mean that they will not rank you high in their results pages and this will deprive of the much wanted traffic that you need for your new website.
Although SEO is a big topic and SEO facts and requirements keep changing and evolving, we have managed to provide below in a nutshell the most important parameters of optimizing a new site and strongly advise any new online-entrepreneur in Cyprus to have a read and act upon the factors listed below:
KEYWORDS RULE!
Perhaps the single most important thing when it comes to searches performed via online search engines are the keywords. With this in mind, your first goal should be the identification of the main keywords that you wish your website to rank for, taking into account that each page on your website should target specific and relevant keywords. For help in determining which keywords are relevant to your specific business, as well as in obtaining other useful information such as the amount of search volume they attract each month and exactly how competitive these keywords are, you can resort to specifically designed tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, or you can hire an external SEO consultant to guide your way. Whichever way you choose, remember that ideally, your website should have several pages, each of which should be optimized for a specific keyword from those that you have decided to target. This is in order to avoid what is called keyword stuffing, which is essentially optimizing a single page for too many keywords simultaneously, which is a turn-off for site visitors and search engines alike, meaning it could harm your SEO rankings.
REMEMBER, REMEMBER TITLE TAGS & META DESCRIPTIONS
Title tags and meta descriptions also form a vital component of your initial effort to optimize your website for search engines’ results, since these two are both used for revealing to users and search engines what your website is about. Therefore each page title should contain a few of your targeted keywords, while the corresponding meta description should provide a brief overview of the page content, that is both concise and targeted. A potential loophole that you should try to avoid is having title tags and meta descriptions that are too long, because these will not be easily read by mobile users and search engines will be able to index them properly, thus adversely affecting search engine rankings.
IMAGE TAGGING IS ALSO A MUST
The next step in the process of initially optimizing your business website is using alt attributes, also known as alternative text, which serve the purpose of facilitating search engines better determine what an image means, by enabling their crawlers to index each image appropriately, based on a description of its appearance through special tags in HTML. Another benefit of alt text is that it is also very helpful to visually impaired users who rely on a screen reader to understand an image.
AND BUILD ON TOO, PLEASE
Another important factor to tend to when initially optimizing your website, is the building internal links within the site itself. This is important because it makes crawling your site easier for search engines, while also improving your keyword rankings in relevant searches and providing visitors to your site with further options to read more and explore deeper. An example of how you can link between the different pages making up your site, thus showing search engines that your entire site works together as a whole and improve your ranking on your specifically targeted keywords, is linking blog posts to service or product pages.
A FINAL TRICK FOR THE TECH-SAVVY
Search engines have to cope with massive amounts of information and data that they need to index, so incorporating in your website code, special code parts, such as Schema markup, can help search engines comprehend your content and be able to produce the best search results for users. Providing search engines which such added technological capabilities on your site, helps them understand, evaluate and rank your content and website better, leading to increased traffic.
So, do you now feel ready and confident to start optimizing your website for search engines? Don’t freak out if your honest answer is a resounding NO! It is true that SEO for a new website is a task that is complex and needs time and effort, and of course certain technical and other specific skills and capabilities, some of them only held by field experts. If you are determined that your new online business should succeed, if you feel that ensuring high internet search result rankings and directing loads of traffic to your site holds the key to gaining customers, making profits and increasing your revenues, then contact us today at start-business-online and let our experts do the hard work and allow you to enjoy the benefits of optimization!
