Ever heard of SEO? Here is why you should!

90% of all internet users have their search done by a search engine instead of directly entering the URL. 3/4 of these 90% stay on the first results page. If your website is not one of the first page search results, chances are tremendously low people will ever find your page. Here is how you can improve the ranking of your page.

Landing Page

This is the first page, the user sees. Offer some information about your company and give an overview on how the reader can navigate through your website. The latter should be as intuitive as possible, as no one is willing to spend time to figure out, how to find the information one is looking for. The easiest way to do so, is to copy and paste the titles of each page into the sitemap. Doing so, you create a sitemap, with which the reader can directly access every single page of your website. Pay attention to the title-tag, as it is one of the most important parts of a page. People using search engines, keep their search simple and so should you, selecting the title for each page. Experts argue that the optimal title consists of about 50 characters, so this should be a benchmark for you. If the user searches for some words, which are also in your title, Google will illustrate these words bold in the snippets. This indicates that your page offers the information the user was looking for.

Don′t:

- select random titles

- use standard titles

- use one title for several pages

- make the title too long

- put unnecessary keywords into your title

Meta Description

Summarizing the content of the page, the meta description shows the user what the page is about, while still being in the results page. Again, Google will illustrate these words bold in the snippets, if they equal the words the user has been looking for. If a specific part of the content of your page should be a better fit, Google will automatically select this part instead of the meta description. So don′t worry too much to find the right words. Accordingly to experts, the meta description should consist of about 150 characters. So there is another benchmark. You′re welcome!

Don′t:

- use illogical sentences

- be too general describing the content

- simply copy the content into the meta description

- use the same description for several pages

URL

Short and logical URLs improve the crawling process for Googlebots, other search engine robots and external links to your page. Imagine your user is on one specific page of your website. Now assume he wants to go back to the landing page, and deletes some characters from the URL in the believe to come back to the landing page. Would he/she get there, because you only used words and logical structures, creating the URL? Or have you used numbers and strange things, which the user simply cannot understand?

Don′t:

- use too long URLs with unnecessary numbers and codes

- use too general URL names

- excessively use keywords in the URL

- create more than one URL per page

Navigation on the page

As mentioned above, the landing page is the most important part of an intuitive navigation. Offer a directory of the structure of your page, by creating sitemaps for the user and HTML- and XML-Sitemaps for web crawler.

Don′t:

- make it too complicated

- include non-funtioning links in your sitemap

- let the 404 page be not designed in your consistent company style 

The content

No questions asked, the content is the most important aspect of building a great website. Users will start to talk about their experiences they had while dealing with your website, so that the potential of good word-of-mouth marketing can be used for your advantage. So focus on the content and create it with love.

Don′t:

- create content with mistakes

- publish the same content of several pages

- use unnecessary keywords

Anchor-tags

With this tag, you can create links to internal and external pages. Again, this helps the user to interact with the page and find further content.

Don′t:

- use generic words as anchors, for example "click here" or "page"

- use nonsense words, which have nothing to do with the content

- use too long anchor-tags

- use CSS in a way that the user cannot see the anchor-tag as an anchor

Pictures

Always describe pictures with the alt-attribute. If the content cannot be shown for what ever reason, screenreader can identify pictures, as they use similarly ás anchor-tags do. Keep the alt-attributes in a separated register′, using file formats as JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP.

Don′t:

- keep the names of the picture too random, for example "picture1.jpg"

- create names, which are too long

- use too many keywords in the alt-attributes

robots.txt

This tool limits the crawling for pages, which are not useful for the user. Just as the "robots" tag, you can also use ".htaccess" to protect access with passwords.

"nofollow"

To fight spam, you can use rel="nofollow" inside of the anchor-tags.

Mobile search

A XML-Sitemap makes it easier for Google to index your website as a website for mobile devices. You should also include "Googlebot-Mobile" into the header of the user-agent.

Backlink structure

To increase the traffic of your page, you can add internal and external links to and from your webpage. This is also very useful if you also manage a page on social media. By adding social icons, you can link to your social media profile, while you can also include the link to your websiteon your social media profile.

If you pay attention to the advice above, your page is likely to perform well. Nevertheless, I cannot guarantee a top performance for your page, as there are many more aspects, which lead to success and failure. I can only motivate you to give it a try, figure out which approach works best for you and never give up. Have fun!