Optimize the New Year - five Simple Steps to Improve Your Website SEO

It's a new year with new goals for your website and your business. What do you have planned to improve the SEO of your website? Do you have plans for this? You certainly should and, with these 5 Simple Steps to Improve Your Website SEO, you can optimize the New Year for your website and your business, improving traffic, enhancing your brand, and increasing sales.

The most popular and productive websites are not static. They change and grow with the ebb and flow of business and search cycles. The owners of these sites understand that doing business on the internet is much like doing business anywhere else, trends change and market forces shift, demanding adjustments from the savvy business owner. To stay on top of these changes requires action and diligence. Following these 5 Simple Steps to Improve Your Website SEO, is the easiest way to do this, allowing you to optimize the New Year.

5 Simple Steps to Improve Your Website SEO

Increase Your Page Count

It's getting so that every website looks the same these days. You hit the landing page of some new site and what do you see? The menu bar at the top of the page has links to "Home," "About," "Services/Products," "Contact Us," and maybe "Blog." As you click on each link and visit each page, you're surprised by the lack of information available. Every paragraph is the same, and it is all self-promotion. Where do you go on the site to find the information you really need?

Secondary Pages will provide this information. These are the pages which enhance the information provided on the Primary Pages mentioned above. Secondary Pages allow you to share the details of your products and/or services for example, also allowing you to create a call-to-action from your visitor. They are also critical to improving your website SEO, giving the search engines more information to crawl and index.

Secondary pages attract the search engines Secondary pages enhance your reader's visit Secondary pages are evergreen content Secondary pages provide internal links Secondary pages allow for a call-to-action

Optimize Your Old Content

Many websites are packed with poorly optimized content. This content is going to waste. However, you can fix this problem by going back and re-optimizing it. Plug in your most effective keywords at the beginning, middle, and end of your old posts, and highlight them with bold, underline, and italics. Also, toss in a couple of headers containing your keywords. And, don't forget to include your existing pages. In other words, make sure your most effective keywords are used on those Primary Pages, as well.

Refresh Your Keyword List

If you were clever and diligent when you began your website, you either performed, or had performed for you, a keyword research project. You found the most effective keywords to bring visitors to your site. Have you updated that list of keywords since then?

Search terms change over time, which means your keywords should change too. Depending on the volatility of your niche and business cycles, you should refresh your keyword list every six to twelve months if you wish to stay at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Post More Optimized Content

This one should really go without saying, but...

Posting fresh, fully optimized content to your website is the most effective way to keep the search engines - and the readers - coming back for more. Blog posts and articles give the search engines a reason to return and help to maintain reader's interest. So simple, yet regularly ignored.

Add a few optimized images

While imagery can definitely enhance your website for your visitor, images are usually considered irrelevant to the search engines. This is not true. When used properly, imagery can actually attract the search engines as well as written content. It just takes a bit of cleverness to accomplish this.

When posting images to your site, first, be careful not to over use them. They really are more difficult for the search engines to crawl but, used sparingly and posted properly, they will enhance your website SEO. Second, and this is the scary part for some, when you post images you should get into the HTML portion of your dashboard and insert your keyword into the "alt" tag of the image. This is not difficult to do and, with just a little research, can be accomplished very simply. Third, before posting your images to your site, title them with the keyword you are using. Without these simple steps, your images will be more of a hindrance than a help to your site's SEO.

Commit Yourself to the 5 Simple Steps to Improve Your Website SEO

Refresh Your Commitment to Improve SEO

All of these 5 Simple Steps to Improve Your Website SEO are good for the improved optimization of your site. However, without a firm commitment to improvement, they will be ineffective. In fact, the most important step to improving your website SEO is the commitment to do all of these things consistently and relentlessly. Taking these steps occasionally will not work, just as doing them only when you feel like it will not work. You must be as diligent as the search engines themselves. As they constantly seek fresh, well-optimized content, so you must constantly provide it for them.

You've already invested your time and money in your website. You can't afford to let it go to waste. Just as the day-to-day running of your business requires follow-through and a relentless commitment to improvement, your website SEO requires the same. If you're having trouble doing it all yourself, there is help available. Simply hire someone to do it for you. You're likely to be pleasantly surprised at how such a relatively small investment in website SEO can pay large dividends in the long run.

SEO Scotland is part of the UK SEO Network. Please also visit our sister sites SEO Essex and SEO Liverpool [l]