Optimizing a website is a very crucial task to help your website be seen, searched for and approved not only by the search engines but also by the users who are the main targets. This article explains some basic Search engine optimization techniques and rules to improve the visibility of your website; combining these techniques and rules can lead your website to noticeable visibility.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, so-called SEO, is the process of augmenting the visibility of a website in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and many more local and global search engines in the world. SEO isn’t an instant marketing solution. It requires time to take effect but builds results/achievements that are solid, stable and important long-term factors for the growth of any business. SEO is the best solution if you want to improve your website’s interaction with both users and search engines regardless of the size and type of your website.

However you should remember that your website’s design and content should be primarily user-oriented (based on visitors’ needs), not search engine oriented (based on search engines’ needs). Having a user-oriented website is possible by creating pages with a suitable design (based on your users’ features), and contents which are easy to read, easy to access and up-to-date. Following these steps, it is time to make your website easy to access (visible) by search engines using SEO techniques.

For most cases the SEO of a website requires tiny modifications to some parts of the website. However, as we mentioned above, you should bear in mind that SEO is not only about visibility in search engines, it is mainly about having more and more interaction with the end users.

Useful techniques regarding improving visibility of websites (Basic SEO)

1- IMPROVING THE WEBSITE’S CONTENT

Having useful text/content in the website can affect the visibility of a website more than any other SEO techniques. It can increase the number of visitor to the website dramatically. It could be happen using useful posts/topics explained in blog sections, social media services (such as Facebook, twitter, etc.), business-oriented social networking services (LinkedIn), email or many other services or media available. Remember to keep adding useful, readable, knowledgeable and unique content to the website.

2- USING UNIQUE AND PROPER PAGE TITLES FOR EACH PAGE ON YOUR WEBSITE

Page titles should be completely related to the content of the page, which is often displayed in the first line of the search results. Each page in your website should have a

Unique title: meaning different titles for each page. This can prevent for mistakenly being considered as pages with duplicated content by search engines.

Relevant titles/keywords: Titles should be completely relevant to the content of the page. If you use several keywords as a page title, place the keywords according to their relevance to the content of page. The most relevant one should be placed at the beginning. There are many tools to find keywords which can help you improve traffic to your website.

Short title: It could be a few words or a phrase but no more than 69 characters. Long titles or long lists of keywords looks suspicious to both the website’s visitors and most of the search engines.

Informative titles: It can help search engines and users to get a general idea about the content of page.

3- USING HEADING TAGS APPROPRIATELY

Heading tags are used to emphasize the importance of text on your page/website and help both users and search engines to understand the main content and topic of pages. However, misuse or overuse can badly affect readability and understandability of page contents by users and search engines. Each page on the website should not contain more than one H1 tag (It should be used only for the headline of a page). H1 tag has more effect on the ranking of a page in comparison to the other headers (H2, H3, and H6).

4- USING META DESCRIPTION TAGS

Meta descriptions give a summary of the page’s content to search engines, they can include several sentences or a short paragraph related to the content, no more than 160 characters.

5- IMPROVING THE STRUCTURE OF A WEBSITE’S URLS

URLs should be easy to remember (can affect accessibility of a website by users) and relevant to the website’s content (can affect search engines).

6- WEBSITES SHOULD BE EASY TO NAVIGATE

It can be a great help, firstly for the websites’ users to find the contents they want, and secondly for search engines to detect/find the main topic or content of a particular page.

7- HAVING SUITABLE ANCHOR TEXT

Having suitable anchor text/ link text (no matter if external or internal links) makes it easy to understand and navigate the page related to that link, by users and some search engines (such as Google), therefore your anchor text should be:

Brief but informative. It helps users and search engines to better understand the page.

Easy to recognize by users by having different colors, font types or font sizes in comparison to other regular texts.

Used for internal links as well. It can make the navigation of your website better for users and Google.

Not overused for any of your website’s pages.

8- OPTIMIZING THE IMAGES USED ON THE WEBSITE

All images used in the website should have proper filenames and relevant texts for their “alt” attributes (It is better to have alternative texts for each image, especially when the image is used as a link). This tag can inform the search engines what your page is about, however, they should be brief and accurate.

9- OPTIMIZING YOUR WEBSITE FOR MULTI-CHANNELS

To achieve a good ranking and more traffic on your website you should also optimize your website for multi-channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on. These days, people read and check the posts in their multi-channel more than their e-mail. Therefore you can use these channels to announce your posts to a vast number of people and furthermore you can receive feedback from them, due to the fact that it is more convenient for people to post a comment on these channels.

10- OPTIMIZING THE WEBSITE FOR A VARIETY OF SEARCH RESULTS

It is very important that the website has been optimized for different types of search results such as video, image, PDF and so on. It is clear that creating rich media contents such as video can be a huge help to improve a search engine’s ranking of a website.

11- HAVING BLOG SECTION IN THE WEBSITE

Websites can become visible by posting new, interesting and up-to-date articles. Furthermore they can attain many more visitors by allowing the blog readers to write comments for each article.

12- HAVING A SUBSCRIBE BUTTON

You should prioritize to keep your website’s visitors/blog readers up-to-date about new articles, products and services in your company using subscription by email. So you optimally want to have some kind of newsletter or platform/media where you announce updates and news.