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SEO Tips For Your New Web Site
New websites might be large or small, but to be successful in the online space, we know absolutely for sure: your website needs to be findable. If you've developed it for business purposes, then getting indexed and positioned high up in the search results in your market should be a primary goal. Why? There are literally hundreds and possibly thousands of other sites you have to compete with whenever a potential customer executes a search in your niche or industry.
Making your website "findable" translates to search engine optimized, or SEO for short.
5 Basic DIY SEO Strategies
Depending on your site, SEO strategies can become fairly complex, but there are a few low-sweat SEO basics you can do yourself to help your site get found.
- Optimize images - large images take a long time to load on a page. If your website includes illustrations, photos and other images, use a photo editing program to resize them for the web. Most photo editing software allows you to easily adjust settings to resize images for faster loading on the web. If you have a site professionally developed, your designer or developer will do this for you.
- Get original content - Write your own page copy, work with your site developer to get original copy crafted, or hire a web copy specialist. Don't use duplicate copy from another web site.
- Target content with keywords - Choose a keyword or keyphrase as a "topic" for each page and include that in your page heading and in your page title tag.
- Create content that's easily "consumed" - You have a few brief seconds to persuade your visitor that the content you have on your page is what they are looking for. Keep paragraphs short. Replace comma-separated lists with bulleted or numbered lists, use white space wisely, and avoid writing in upper case.
- Develop title and description meta tags - There are two important SEO elements to create for the search results: the page title tag (it appears in the browser bar at the top of any webpage) and the description tag (it's the text snippet that appears in the search results), which describes in one or two sentences what the page is about-it's akin to a little teaser ad.