1. Attractive, User Friendly Design – The design of your website can affect its ranking to a search engine. Smooth designs and easy navigation can help fix this issue. For more on this view our previous article on the subject.
  2. Utilize Social Media – Your business pages on Social Media should have links to and from your website. This makes it easier for customers to find you, and can increase your following. Posting links to your recent blog articles or latest events can get more of your followers to keep coming back to you for business. You do not have to make pages on every social media site. Focus on a few that will work the best for your business. Facebook is a goto for almost any business. Pinterest is for a more visual company.
  3. Incorporate Social Media Buttons – Sharing content from your site via social media buttons is easier with these buttons. It makes it easier for your customers to share your information and see your business on Facebook, Pinterest, and the other platforms you may want to utilize.
  4. Name Your Images – The systems that check your site and SEO don’t see your pictures, but they do see what they are called. Naming the images with descriptive and relevant titles can help the Search Engines pick up on the information. For instance, a picture of a steak called “dinner-steak-restaurant.jpg” will bring more results than “gerfuj38b2w28r.jpg”
  5. Avoid Using Flash for Navigation – The systems that search the content of your site try to navigate all of your content from the home page. However, they do not use flash. Since they do not have flash, the bots cannot figure out how to see the full website if you use it for navigation; Ranking you worse than websites without flash navigation.
  6. Group Content by Relevance – Not only does this help users find the information they need from your site, but it makes it simpler for the SEO tracking systems to check your content and see what is important.
  7. Test Your Website in Various Browsers – Different customers may use different browsers to view your website. While your website may look the way you want it to in Google Chrome, it may look slightly different in Internet Explorer or Safari. Using the latest updated versions of multiple browsers, check to see how your sight may look to visitors.
  8. Use a Short but Descriptive URL – The URL of your website should tell both people and SEO bots what it is about. Your business name, sometimes including a location or key word, such as thestonehousesi.com or z-onerestaurant.com can show where you are or what you do.
  9. Use Headlines to Your Advantage – SEO bots see headlines as more important, because they are bigger than the rest of the content on the page. Use this to your advantage by making them relevant and focused. Do not make your headlines too long, or it will downgrade the importance of your headlines. Use different sizes of headings (h1, h2, h6, etc.) to denote the differences of importance in your content.
  10. Stick with One Template or Look – Don’t change the design of the site for each page. Not only is this extra work, but it is very unattractive to potential customers. Use one, central template as the design for your website.