If your new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Check out this video before reading!

If you have an online business, search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial aspect to your business. It can’t be an afterthought. You have to build it into your online marketing strategy from the very beginning.

Generating traffic from organic searches to your website is a key part of your online business, but many businesses design their websites without factoring SEO into the design. You might have a beautiful design, but without the SEO “guts” you won’t get too far. Your site should look nice and modern, but it also needs to be built to handle lead generation and search marketing.

Where to Begin with SEO

You really should be spending significant time on your SEO, or paying someone to think about it for you. So what are the things you need to consider?

It starts with the domain you choose. It has to make sense and relate to what you do in your business. For example: if you’re in the landscaping business, choosing a domain that has ‘landscaping’ in it will help with your ranking. If you have other domains, you have to make sure that they all properly point to this main site.

Don’t skimp when it comes to who is hosting your site, it needs to be fast so your users are happy. Virteom offers premium hosting to ensure load speed is never an issue.

It's All in the Content

Your site needs to be SEO-friendly, meaning that search engine’s web crawler needs to be able to read pages all across your site. You need easy-to-understand content.

It’s really important to use a content management system (CMS) from the outset. Systems like Virteom’s CMS are already “pre-wired” in a way that search engines like Google can understand them. And your CMS will grow with you as your business grows. For example, if you later decide to add a blog or a form, that feature is already built into the CMS.

While you may have lots of images and video in your content, search engine web crawlers read text, so you have to have enough of it. Your main content should always be text. At the end of the day, content that is clear and succinct about who you are and what you do for your customers will rule the day. Certainly, images and video are important, but use text description tags (alt-tags); this will ensure they are indexed so web crawlers can discover them. (Not sure how to add alt tags in Virteom CMS? Check out this article)

Finally, your site needs organizational structure—an information architecture. This is your site map, plan it out ahead of time and leave room for areas you’d like to add later. Think of it as an outline that you’d write for a paper or presentation, it’s the same thing.
 

Need someone to guide your SEO? Virteom’s team has SEO and web development expertise, Contact Us to learn how we can improve your ranking!