One of the most critical pieces of your digital marketing strategy needs to be Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your website. If you are not optimizing your website for the search engines, no one is going to find you.

Search engines are automated services that scour the Internet for new and relevant content on the most common searches that people have. It is not a person behind a computer who will serve your website to a user, it is an algorithm and therefore your website has to have certain things that that algorithm is looking for in order to be crawled in a timely manner.

One of the most important elements of SEO is the content that you write on the page. This is critical to being found and indexed by the search engines, but it is not the only thing you should pay attention to. Start with your content and then learn and understand these five other elements that matter in your efforts to be found online.

1. Site speed. It matters to the search engines whether your site loads quickly or not. It matters to the search engines, because it matters to the user of your site. You generally get 3 seconds to catch someone’s attention and then they are gone to the next site that can hopefully answer the question they have. If your site doesn’t load in that time, they won’t stay and you will lose credit in the search results.
2. Device compatibility. With nearly 70% of all traffic to websites coming from mobile devices, it is very important to your search engine optimization efforts that your site loads well on all sizes of devices. Whether someone is viewing your site on a TV screen or a phone and anything in between, your site should be compatible.
3. Website security. You may not think you need to worry about this especially if you are not collecting your user’s data, but search engines (specifically Google) are now requiring that websites be secure and are taking this into account when ranking the content on a site. If you don’t have a green padlock on your site, you might want to get one. [This is an advanced technique that you might need some help with.]
4. Create good titles for all of your pages. Search engines look at the titles of your page to determine quickly what that page is about. If your titles are not optimized for the keywords you want to rank for in the search results you may struggle to make it off the fourth page of the search results. If you have properly optimized title tags your content may get crawled faster and moved up the rankings more quickly.
5. Be wary of big images. Images can have a tremendous impact on the aesthetic of your website, but they can also present an area of trouble as it relates to your search engine optimization. Without proper tagging, search engines will just see a file and nothing else there and assume that’s all the website is about. Tagging can give you the best of both worlds, the pleasing aesthetic and the content that the search engines crave.

Making your website search engine friendly will go a long way in getting noticed and reaching the top of the search engine results pages. If you’re not on the 1st page for a particular keyword phrase then you will struggle to see results from your website. It may take time and resources dedicated to the pursuit of the top spot on the search engine results page, but the effort, commitment, and investment will be worth it once your customers are finding you above all your other competition.

If these five steps are daunting for you, we can help. Contact us to help you put together a search engine optimization strategy that will be right for your business.