How to Optimize Your Website or Blog for Search Engines

We get a lot of requests from companies to help optimize their websites for better search engine rankings. But we can’t provide SEO services for everyone (as much as we’d like to). That’s why we publish this blog. It allows us to provide an educational service for those companies we cannot work with on an individual basis.

In today’s lesson, I’ll explain how you can optimize your website or blog for the search engines. But first, we need to address the terminology being used:

Website optimization — When you optimize your website, you make certain changes to it that will improve your search engine visibility and traffic levels. Most of these changes have to do with the structure of the website, the content, or what’s known as link popularity. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with some of these terms. I will explain them in more detail as we go.

With that definition out of the way, let’s talk about how to optimize your website for search engines.

Optimize the Website Structure

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have a well-organized website. This helps you in two ways. It allows readers to find the information they want. And it allows search engines to more effectively crawl and index your website.

In this context, being “indexed” means that a certain page of your site has been added to the search engine’s database. Ideally, all of your web pages will be indexed by the major search engines. But it doesn’t always work that way. That’s why you need to optimize your website for better “crawl-ability.” And the best way to do this is to make sure it’s organized in a logical way.

This is fairly easy on a small website, where most of the pages can appear in the main menu. But for a larger site with many pages and sections, you need to give some serious thought to your navigation structure. Again, you want to make the website easier to navigate for readers and search engines alike.

One thing you can do to improve the organization and optimization of your site is to use topic and subtopic pages. For example, let’s say your company offers 25 different products or services. You obviously can’t put all of those items in the website’s main menu. This would make your menu unusable. But you can put the primary topic pages in the menu, and then link to the subtopic pages from the primary page.

For example, you put “products” in the main menu. When somebody clicks on the products link, they land on the main page for that topic. There they can find a complete list of all your products and learn more about each one. You would probably have a separate web page for each of your products as well. This makes life easier for your readers (which is most important), and it helps search engines crawl through your site. This is one of the ways you can optimize your website for search engine visibility.

Use a Sitemap to Help Search Engines Find You

If you have a large site, you should also create a sitemap to help search engines find and index all of your pages. I’m not talking about the kind of sitemap that’s used for people — although those can be helpful as well. I am talking about a specifically formatted file that lists all the pages on your blog or website.

How does this optimize your site for search engines? When the crawler visits your website, it will look for the sitemap file we just talked about. This file is easily found because it sits in the root folder (where your home page resides). So when the search engines have found the site map, they have essentially found every page of your website. This will prevent the problem of certain pages being overlooked.

Helpful tools:

• Learn more about XML sitemaps (sitemaps.org)
• Create a sitemap for your website (xml-sitemaps.com)

If you’re starting a new website from scratch, you might want to use content-management system (CMS) to make your life easier. These programs can also help you optimize your website for better search engine visibility. WordPress is one of the best tools for this purpose. Most people know it as a blogging tool, but it can also function as a content-management system for your entire website. In other words, you can run an entire website with WordPress — in addition to a blog.

This can help you optimize your website in several ways. First, WordPress follows a logical organization method. So it makes it easy for search engines to find all of your content. You can also install a “plug-in” that will automatically generate a sitemap file, like we discussed earlier. WordPress also makes it easy to publish new content on a regular basis. Frequent publishing is another way you can optimize your website for search engine visibility. We will discuss this in more detail below.

Your Website Content Plan

We talked about some of the ways you can optimize your website from a structural standpoint. Now let’s talk about the content side of things. Creating content is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your search engine traffic. With all other things being equal, a website with 100 pages of content will pull in a lot more traffic than a 5-page website. So you should create a content plan to perpetuate the growth of your website.

If you haven’t done so already, create a list of keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business. There are several keyword research tools online that can help with this task. I recommend that you use Google’s keyword tool, because it will give you additional suggestions beyond the specific phrases you enter. You can use this list of keywords to optimize your website and increase your site traffic. It’s a great starting point for building your content plan.

It’s also wise to come up with a publishing schedule. Your goal is to create a content-rich website that will pull in traffic for many different kinds of search queries. In order to accomplish this, you must publish new content on a regular basis. This is another reason to install a user-friendly content-management system, such as WordPress. The WordPress blogging program makes it easy to publish information on a regular basis. If you want to optimize your website for better search engines, you have to learn to think like a publisher.

It’s competitive out there. There are a lot of other people in your industry, and I can guarantee they all have websites. But there are only 10 spots on the first page of search results. This is where you want to appear. So you must optimize your website from a structural standpoint, as well as the content standpoint. Publish new information on a regular basis. Create quality content that engages and helps the reader. This will help you attract links from other websites, which will boost your Google rankings even more.

Promoting Your Content

If you work hard to create quality content, you obviously want people to know about it. This is only logical. So you need to promote the content you’ve worked so hard to develop. This is another way to optimize your website for better search engine rankings.

This brings us to the concept of link building. This is the act of acquiring links from other websites in order to boost your search engine ranking. Google, Yahoo and Bing all use “link popularity” as a ranking factor — albeit to varying degrees. A website with a higher number of links from reputable sites will outrank a similar website with fewer links.

Getting a link from a reputable website is a form of endorsement. The other site is saying, “Here is something of value that you might want to read.” This helps search engines determine which sites should be ranked higher, and which ones should be ranked lower. So if you want to optimize your website for higher rankings, you need to gradually acquire new links over time.

The best way to do this is by creating quality content, as we discussed earlier. Next, you need to promote your content so the right people know about it. You can do this in a variety of ways. You could publish the results of some research you did, and then send out a press release to specific websites and journals. You can also promote your content through social-networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

This article explains how to optimize a website for better search engine rankings. As you can see, it’s not rocket science. It’s time-consuming, and I’ll be the first person to tell you that. But it’s not complicated. In order to optimize your site, you need to organize it in a logical way. You also need to create quality content, and publish new content on a regular basis. Once you have these fundamentals in place, you can begin to promote your content through PR, social media and other channels.

Our Optimization Services

We can help you with many of the things discussed in this article. We can conduct a website assessment with specific recommendations for improvement. We can do phone consultations to help you optimize your website more effectively. And we can help you create new content to grow your site over time. If you would like to learn more about our services, you can use the menu at the top of this page. Or just send us an e-mail with any questions you have.