This post is a second in a series answering the question, “How Can My Business Rank Higher in the Search Engines“.
Today’s post is “5 Tips to Have a Great Website Foundation”.
As a quick review, there are three different aspects to help any business website rank better in the search engines:
1) Have a Good Foundation
2) Have a Site that is Updated Regularly with Original Content
3) Use Video to Help in SEO
Today, we are going to look at the first of these three items, the foundation of your website.
The foundation of your website is the actual code, the images, the stylesheets – each of the items that make up the physical website that when put together, make the website that you see when you type in your business website URL in a browser.
Before you decide that your website looks fine so everything must be good, you can take a look at these five different tips that will help you determine how well of a foundation you have on your business website.
#1 – You Have Done Keyword Research
There are a number of free tools out on the web – Google having one of the most prominent ones – where you can determine what phrases and keywords are being used in search queries in your local area. This can help a business owner make sure that you have your content written toward those keywords.
#2 – Make Sure You Have Valid Code
What ‘having valid code’ means is that you have a developer who developed your website and that they have done all the proper techniques in coding your website in the best possible way.
You can check the code on your website by using this free tool – http://validator.w3c.org – type in your business URL and click on ‘Validate’ and it will tell you if there are any errors or not. If you have a large number of errors, that is something that you will want to discuss with a web developer.
#3 – Use a Sitemap
You can view the Design850 site map – click here for the sitemap – this is the sitemap that I use and submit to Google on a regular basis.
From a business website, you want to make sure your website has a sitemap and that you submitted that sitemap to Google, especially as you add new content to your website.
#4 – Take Care of the Technical Stuff
This is a wide ranging set of items to consider and one of the best tools I have found on the web that can tell you how you are doing on taking care of technical stuff is Website Grader and you can view the free tool here – click here for Website Grader – and once here you can type in your business URL and it will tell around 20-30 different factors about your website and then assign your website a grade.
Design850.com Website Grader Score
The best part about this tool is not only is it free, but it will also give you some direction on how to improve your score.
#5 – Keep Your Website Updated Regularly
We will discuss this idea further in our next blog and video post.
We hope that you have enjoyed today’s video and blog post and encourage you to ask any questions by using the Quick Question form located on the sidebar area of this website.