Search Engine Optimization for Business Websites

What is website optimization?

Website optimization is all about leveraging online market data, website analytic data and user behaviour statistics, to improve your website performance.

How is a website optimized?

When creating a website there are important elements to keep in mind (which are often overlooked to save on time and budget). Each of these elements will play a vital role in the efficiency of your website: it will be easier to find on the Internet, your website traffic will increase, navigation will become more intuitive and the overall user experience will improve. The following elements are considered when optimizing a website:

Content quality

Writing on the web is not like writing in print; sentences must be shorter, catch-phrases more prevalent, content division must respect the 1/3:2/3 standard and adapt to varying screen resolutions. In addition, it must be taken into account the visitors will often only survey website content.

Navigation Structure

Website navigation is one of the most overlooked elements, and poor navigability can be extremely frustrating for a user. Website navigation must be linear, must always allow the visitor to go back to where he was and must allow the user to know at all times “where” he is in your website. The keyword of this element is "intuitive". Keeping your website navigation as intuitive as possible is guaranteed success.

Internal Linking Strategy

Not all pages in your website carry the same importance. You should put more emphasis on links to your top selling products than to your terms & agreement page. Internal linking strategies are complex to implement, but well worthwhile. With the proper structure, your entire website works to push the most important pages on top.

Keyword targeting and keyword usage

If you want your website to appear on search engine result pages when a user is looking for your products or services, then you must have content rich with keywords related to those searches. Keywords need to be used in strategic areas of your web pages and your website needs to be properly structured in order to help search engines properly categorize and position your website.

SERP snippet quality

When users use search engines, they are delivered a list of results, each of these results is a "SERP snippet". The relevance and impact of the SERP snippet is largely responsible for the frequency at which visitors enter your website (click-through rate). Through keyword research and online marketing best-practices, SERP snippets can dramatically increase in performance.

Design standards & ergonomy

Search engines also rate website design structure and benchmark it against what they determine is a "top quality website". While design gives more life and emotion to your website, it is also responsible for a great part of the user-experience. By using design standards your visitors will have a better experience on your website, and search engines will improve your site ranking accordingly.