With yellowpages, newspaper ads, magazines, and other forms of advertising being pushed aside, small business owners are turning to the internet to build awareness and increase revenue. Here are some simple things you can do to optimize your website to rank highly in the search engines for the keyword(s) you’re targeting.

After you have decided on the keyword(s) you want to target, these are the different website elements you will need to optimize to increase your site’s position in the search engines:

Note: It’s important to remember that each page on your website can be optimized for an individual target keyword.

Title Tags

The title tag of your website is the most important on-site optimizations you can do. In this section of your code, you will want to include your target keyword and a benefit. For example, if you are dentist who operates his practice in Salt Lake City, Utah, you would want to optimize your title tag using a title like this: Salt Lake City Dentist – Quality Care For Less.

The title tag code looks like this:

your page title

Meta Tags

Meta tags are no longer an important factor in website optimization. I know this might come as a shock to some, but they stopped being an effective optimization tool almost ten years ago.

GEO Tags

GEO tags are a part of the website code that allows you to optimize your site for your businesses actual location. Continuing on with the above example, if you’re a Salt Lake City dentist, you can optimize your site for that location.

The GEO tag code looks like this:

[meta name=”geo.position” content=”latitude; longitude”]

Description

The description of your website should include your target keyword and a brief explanation, 150 characters or less, of your website or business. Remember that you also want to focus on the benefits your customers would receive by doing business with you.

The description code looks like this:

[meta name=”Description” content=”your website’s description”/]

Navigation

The navigation element is another very important factor when optimizing your website. Essentially, you want to make it easy for your visitors and the search engines to navigate your site. A good website organization would be to have a navigation bar at the top of your website with separate pages and subpages if nessasery. You can find a good example here: http://www.dentistincherryhill.com

Content

Your website content should always be high-quality and offer value to the visitor. Your website content can also be optimized for your target keyword(s). Make sure that each paragraph on your site contains related words of your target keyword(s). Paragraph tags are called header tags, and they range in importance from one to six.

The header tag code looks like this:

[H1]your paragraph title[/H1] [H2]your paragraph title[/H2] Etc

These are some simple on-site optimization elements you can use on your website to increase your site’s position in the search engines. Check-out our Local Search Engine Optimization Services for Small Business and get your website ranked by our professional SEO team.

Note: All [ & ] need to be replaced with < & > before any of the above codes are implemented for website optimization.