The Importance of a Well Optimized Website

...People will only “walk in the front door” of your business (visit your website) if they find you somewhere on the Internet (most likely through a search engine). With that, since users are using search engines to find answers to their questions, it’s extremely important to show up within the first few search results. When was the last time you went to the 2nd page in the search results?

It’s clear that consumers are researching more and more via the Internet. And having a well optimized site can increase your marketing effectiveness. A great way to tell immediately how your site is performing is to submit your url to Website Grader by HubSpot. Google has about 200 ranking factors that they take into consideration when showing your website in the SERPS (search engine results pages).

Here are the top 5 ranking factors that have been determined by top SEO agents:

1. Keyword focused anchor text – making your keywords links – but definitely not “spammy” – make sure the links actually make sense. Making your keywords linkable shows the search engine the linked text is relevant to the landing page of the search result.


2. External link popularity – the more quality websites that point back to your site the better (quality is always better than quantity) – the search engines value other websites that link to you – especially if those websites are highly trusted


3. Diverse link sources – getting a variety of links – don’t just get backlinks from directory sites or blog comments, etc. If your website gets linked to from many different sources the search engines see this variety as a good thing (again the directory sites, press releases, blogs, news sites, etc.) 


4. Using keywords anywhere in the title tag – it’s shown in the SERPS and it helps the search engines understand what your page is about 


5. Trustworthy domain – your domain’s age and getting backlinks from trustworthy sites play a part in this as it’s not exactly clear what makes it a “trustworthy domain”