It’s not a revolutionary statement to say that it’s extremely important to have a beautifully designed and well positioned website. Not only if you represent an IT or Internet company but for almost every organization. The number of customers finding products, services and business partners is already high and will surely continue to increase. Everyone knows that but only few apply best practices to achieve high page ranking and consequently high customers traffic.

The key to achieve that is Search Engine Optimization and here are a few tips about it.

SEO Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine. Read more about SEO on Wikipedia.

Here are several tips to apply to get most out of your website.

SEO friendly URLs

This is a very powerful tool to improve consistency between URL and page content. Almost every modern website framework will make it easy for a developer to implement.

Basically page URL should reflect more or less what is the content of the page. So instead of: http://example.com/artice/1765.html you should implement something like http://example.com/new-technologies-in-organic-farming. Moreover the text of the link directing to the page should be as similar to the URL and the content as much as possible. So link to the page from the example above may be like: Learn more about new technologies in organic farming

Additionally:

• URLs should contain small letters, digits and dashes (-) instead of underscores (_).
• URLs should not end with an extension like .html or .php God forbid :) - this does not affect a page rank but makes an address more eye-friendly

SEO friendly HTML structure

HTML structure contains many different tag types but some of them are more important for search engines than others - they are h1, h2, h3,… headers. That is why all the phrases you want your website to be searched by should appear in the headers, eg. <h1>New technologies in organic farming</h1> <h2>Farming in Ohio</h2>

Extensive meta tags

Meta tags help search engines and social media services like facebook or twitter to access information more easily. For example if you have many images on a page you can tell facebook to choose a specific image once someone shares a link to the page. You can find more about certain types of mete tags here.

Page speed optimization

Page loading speed is also one of the factors that affect website page rank. Not to duplicate content, you can find all suggestions for mobile and desktop versions of your website here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Keywords & Keywords Planner

Keyword Planner is a useful tool in developing SEO strategies, conducting content marketing activities or SEO campaigns. Thanks to it we can quickly and efficiently research phrases. The tool tells us what words to use in our campaigns. It also shows the estimated CPC cost of a given phrase, keyword competitiveness, seasonality chart, as well as the average monthly number of searches for that phrase.

Here are some more rules you should take into account when choosing keywords:

• Don’t try to compete for very popular keywords - being on the first page with a phrase “apartment for rent” is almost impossible so try to narrow it down: “1 bedroom apartment for rent in Hamburg”. This phrase is very precise so far less websites use it and what is more important, a user who types it in is more likely your customer.
• Don’t overuse keywords - repeat keywords only as many times as it’s needed and do not repeat it over and over again. This not only makes your content look like a marketing piece of c..p but also looks suspicious for search engines.

Remarketing

Facebook Pixel

It can be compared to Google Analytics tracking code. After installing Facebook Pixel on your website, we are able to properly target our ads displayed on Facebook, Instagram or other websites cooperating with Facebook. Thanks to it, we can create advanced sales funnels - e.g. if we would like to display ads to customers who were on our site but for some reason did not decide to shop.

Google Analytics Conversions

Conversion takes place when a user entering your site performs an important action for you. For example, filling out the contact form, downloading the ebook, leaving the contact details, downloading our application or buying your goods. Conversion tracking is important when running marketing campaigns. For this purpose, you should be using UTM markers embedded in URL addresses, thanks to which you are able to check which channel or even which advertising creative has brought you the most conversions.

Newsletter

It’s wise to build a database of potential customers once they visit your site. Something caught their attention so convincing them to join the newsletter is a win-win solution. You are extending your potential customers database and they are sure that they won’t miss any important information.

After they join the newsletter, you can send them important notifications, special offers, exclusive/premium information, etc.

Usability

Mobile first design

Nowadays people are using mobile phones all the time. A phone is the first thing a person contacts in the morning and the last thing before going to sleep. The 2019 research showed that people on average are scrolling down 91 meters per day.

That is why mobile friendly design is so important. It’s highly possible that the first contact with your website will be from mobile. And remember, for most of the time, you have only 1 opportunity to attract a customer so it’s better not to fail on the first impression.

Customer oriented content

Instead of writing how your company is awesome and unique, concentrate on customer’s profit. These days people do not have time to read the “About Us” section. They need a binary answer to certain questions as quickly as possible. The question is: “Can I get a profit here” and the answer should appear on the main page right after it’s open.