When it comes to optimizing your website for both visitors and rankings within the search engines there are certain ‘best practices’ that must be followed in order to maximize the effectiveness of your optimization efforts. Below are what we consider to be the critical essential for optimizing your website, both for site visitors and to gain increased rankings from within the search engines.
One of the more important aspects of a well-optimized website that people are increasingly forgetting about is the actual architecture of the site itself, that is to say how the site is organized and laid out.
A website that is architecturally optimized will be easy to navigate and have a clean and concise organization of both directory and file structure, position and layout. In the end a site that is optimized to be easy to navigate will be both easy to use for your visitors and optimized for the search engines.
The second aspect of a well-optimized website would most certainly be the keywords. The keywords of the site have to be carefully researched in order for you to get the maximum affect from them. Researching keywords can be a tiresome and tedious task but choosing the right keywords will allow you to capture the most amounts of unique visitors and increase your rankings for those specific keywords. A general rule of thumb is to concentrate on keywords that have a high search volume but low competition.
The last and perhaps most important aspect (besides quality unique content) would have to be the off-page optimization of your website. Most people in the SEO industry will agree that backlinks are perhaps the most important factor to getting your site to rank high on the search engines. You need to find the best places to submit your website links to and these places can include Directories, Forums, Articles and of course paid advertisements and links.
The best type of link is a natural link, that is, a link that you get for free from a relevant and relating source. In my experience if you have quality content on your site that your visitors actually want to read, they will link to it, and this is the best kind of link you can get.
