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S. E. O. To some, these letters might as well be UFO, considering the level of mystery and elusiveness that surrounds the entire concept of SEO and what it means to optimize your website. Let’s peel back the curtain a little bit, though, and hopefully tear down the scary façade that SEO presents to so many people trying to make a name for themselves in the crazy world of web.

First things first: What does SEO even mean? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a set of activities both on-site and off-site that attempt to improve a website’s ranking in search engine results.

But what are those activities, you ask? Well, that’s a great question, and the answer to it is ever changing, and ever mysterious. There is no published list out there that gives a definitive and complete checklist of all the activities that can be done to optimize your website and improve your search engine rankings. There are, however, a lot of activities that are known to be effective SEO boosters, and those are the activities that agencies perform for their SEO clients. While it’s best to leave hardcore SEO work to web professionals, there are a few things that you can do on your own website that can help give you a little boost in SEO, without dishing out cash for a full-blown SEO campaign.

Here is a short checklist of action items you can take to get started self-optimizing your website:

1. Determine Target Keywords

When thinking of the keywords you want to target, you need to get into the mind of your customer base. Think to yourself, “If I were searching for my goods/services, what would I type into Google?”

If you sell tractor parts, your keyword may need to be “tractor parts” or “tractor repair.” If you provide plumbing, you may want your keywords to be “plumbing services” or “toilet emergency please help.” Okay just kidding about that last one, but you get the idea. Whatever you think your customers might be typing into Google, you want to optimize your website for those words.

2. Use Keywords Strategically

It used to be that SEO was determined primarily by your heavy usage of the targeted keywords. Over time, search engines like Google realized that by rewarding sites for “keyword stuffing” and simply cramming their keywords into the content as much as possible, they were allowing sites to show up high in the rankings that weren’t actually all that helpful to site visitors.

Google has changed their approach and now values relevant, useful, authoritative, and user-friendly websites far more than the sites that simply throw their keyword in every chance they get. It’s important to still make a concerted effort to use your exact keyword, but don’t use it excessively. Making your pages readable and useful for humans is much a more effective approach to optimize your website, rather than trying to write for the sake of search engines.

3. Include Links Throughout Content

One important factor for SEO is having your on-site content linking to other pages. These links can be internal (meaning they lead to other pages on your website) as well as external (meaning they lead to other websites).

When writing your content, try to include links to other relevant pages on your site. Links connect your website to other, related content, which helps establish credibility and trustworthiness. When Google sees your page linked to other high-quality and helpful webpages, it begins to see your site as an authoritative resource for the given subject and in turn it will optimize your website for the given topics and keywords.

4. Include Images Throughout Content

Including images on your website pages is really helpful for SEO, but it also simply makes your site easier to read. Especially on text-heavy pages, it’s important to break up the monotony with relevant images that help convey your message.

When you upload these images to insert into your site, make sure you name the image file with your keywords included. If the page is optimized for the word “emergency plumbing,” then perhaps upload an image of your plumbing truck or your plumber working on a sink and title the image “emergency-plumbing.jpg,” as opposed to “img475362.jpg” because, yes, Google even pays attention to small things like that! Optimize your website for the desired keywords in the big things AND the little things – as sometimes those little things will make a big difference in your rankings.

5. Include Target Keywords in URL’s

On most website content management systems, you have control over the contents of each webpage’s URL. It’s really important to include your keywords in your URL’s, as it’s one of the first components of your website that Google sees as it crawls through the web looking for relevant search results.

For instance, you don’t want your URL to read: www.example.com/a3x7yth9058

Instead, you want it to read something like: www.example.com/emergency-plumbing-iowa-city

You can already tell just from reading the URL what that page is about and whether or not it’s relevant to your search term (which, if your search term was “emergency plumbing iowa city,” then it is clearly relevant).

We at Big Imprint put this to practice across our website also. For instance, links like www.bigimprint.com/website-design-work-iowa-city-portfolio/ and www.bigimprint.com/web-design-marketing-team-big-imprint/ tell you what exactly you’ll be seeing on the page, while also utilizing the keywords we wish to target.

In Closing

There are a plethora of other activities and steps that you can take on your website to continue to make it as optimized as possible, but this short list is a good place to start if you’re just getting into it for the first time and it don’t want to spend a ton of time and money.

If you are looking to take a major leap in SEO, you may want to hire professional help. While the steps listed above are a good starting place, you may want to bring in professionals if you’re in a competitive market and really need to try and stand out. There are a lot of things that agencies can do on-site and off-site that will help you increase in the rankings more quickly, plus they typically track your keywords and make adjustments accordingly so you are able to see that the campaign is working.

Styles change. If you need evidence of that, go to your local Goodwill (or reach into your closet, if you’re old enough) and grab a pair of parachute pants and wear them out in public. You’ll be able to tell fairly quickly from the elongated stares that you, my friend, are way out of style. Much like in fashion, styles in websites are always changing as well. That’s why it’s important to stay current on web design best practices.

Many people aren’t totally aware of the changes in web design styles that have taken place over the past several years, and oftentimes their websites are fossils of an internet age gone by. These sites are artifacts of a time in internet history that is long gone, and are rendered practically unusable for most modern-day internet surfers.

If you’re going to attract, engage, and ideally make a customer out of the modern website visitor, there are a number of elements to your web design that these visitors are going to expect to see on your website. The risk you run with not meeting your site visitors’ expectations is that you might drive them away from your site due to confusion or frustration before you’ve been able to capture their contact information, or even simply communicate your value.

Here are some of the basic best practices of web design that people expect to see on any modern website:

1. Mobile-Optimization

The year is 2018 – this should just be a given at this point. Mobile-optimization is a staple of modern web design best practices, and it should be considered a mandatory practice for any new site being built. Unfortunately, time and time again we come across websites that are STILL not optimized for mobile. If you don’t know what mobile-optimization means – it’s when your website changes sizes and formats depending on the device on which it’s being viewed. Sites that are not mobile-optimized remain in one format and cause difficulty when being viewed on various smaller screens, like smartphones. This causes your website users to have to “pinch and zoom” to be able to read the tiny text and hit the tiny buttons. Oftentimes, if a site visitor opens the site on their phone only to find that it’s not mobile-optimized, they’ll leave the site right away without giving it much of a chance.

You have to make sure that your site is mobile optimized, or else it may lead directly to you losing potential customers.

2. Predictable, Easy to Use Menu

Nothing is more frustrating than when you’re on a website looking for certain information, and you’re not able to find the menu that could take you to it. When sites are outdated, oftentimes their menus are confusing and aren’t located in the normal places where people expect them to be. This is especially true when on mobile. Menus become incredibly difficult to find when the site is being viewed on a phone, and visitors have to employ the “pinch and zoom” method in order to press the tiny little menu options.

Menus should always be on the top of the page, and should be accessible from every page of the website, often being repeated in the footer of the site. On mobile, the menu should be “responsive,” meaning it should turn into a hamburger (three lines stacked on one another) that visitors can press so that the menu pops out from the side and is easy to read and select the menu options. Often, web design best practices come down to pure common sense – think about where you would expect the menu to be on a website, and put the menu in that same spot on yours.

3. Simple, Concise Content

“Analysis paralysis” what happens when people are presented with too much information and too many options that they freeze and are hesitant to make a decision. You see this when you go to a restaurant with no real focus or category and you’re stuck between getting waffles, pizza, or chicken masala. Okay, maybe you’ve never been to a restaurant that serves all those, but you get the point. Too many options can be a bad thing, especially when you’re communicating your products/services to someone for the first time. That’s why one of the most important web design best practices you should employ is simplifying your content and focusing on benefits, not features.

On your website, the best way to capture people’s attention is to give them little bits of information at a time, and make sure that information is easy to understand. If you have a complicated service, don’t feel like you need to explain everything right there on the home page of your website. For instance, if you’re on a car website, you probably want to know if the car rides smooth and if it will keep your kids safe. You don’t want to get bogged down with jargon about the shock suspension system (I don’t know much about cars, can you tell?).

Use the site to communicate what problems you solve and what benefits you provide, and get people’s contact information by using tools like “request a demo” or “speak with a specialist” to set up a time to walk them through what you do verbally, in-person, or via video conference.

4. Clear Calls to Action

Okay, so maybe this isn’t necessarily something that site visitors are really dying to see on your site, but these are what you should be MAKING them see on your site. Calls to action are what take your site visitors from simply being pedestrians to actually being leads for your business. A call to action is an action that you want your site visitors to take that signify to you that they’re a hot lead. This varies depending on your website and your business, but often a call to action is a button that leads people to do something. For instance, if you sell your products on the site, the call to action would be “Buy Now” and the button would lead them to a page to add a product to their shopping cart. If you’re an auto body shop, the call to action might be “Request a Quote” and it would lead them to a form they can fill out with the necessary information for you to send them a quote for your services.

Calls to action not only allow you to gather lead information, but they also make the experience of working with you easier for your customers. When a site visitor is on your site and all they see is general information and no call to action, they may feel overwhelmed and not really know what the first step is to acquiring your goods/services. Today’s web design best practices tell us that strategically placed calls to action help take your site visitors from point A to point B. Point A being casual site visitor, point B being a potential customer.

Implementing Web Design Best Practices for Yourself

Now, this list is far from exhaustive, as there are a plethora of other factors that go into a complete, robust, high quality web design. This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to best practices for modern web design. Other components of a website vary greatly depending on the company and the function the website serves. For instance, the needs of a manufacturing company website are very different from those of a non-profit website. When looking to implement these practices for yourself, you may want to consult with, or simply outsource to, web design experts.

Feel like you need to chat and flesh out your web design needs with experts? Reach out to us at Big Imprint and we’ll be happy to chat with you about implementing the web design best practices that are specific to your needs.