There’s no point to having a beautiful website if people aren’t visiting it. That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO is your website’s visibility in search engine results. For example, if you’re a CPA in Concord, and someone searches on Google, Bing, etc. using the keywords “CPA Concord,” your SEO will determine where you land in the results. There are many ways to improve your SEO, and may vary based off of how your website is built. For example, if your website is on the WordPress CMS (Content Management System), there are more effective and easy methods to improve your SEO than if you have a static HTML site. Please read the below checklist to determine how to improve your SEO. You can also see how to improve your SEO on a more technical/back-end level by going to an SEO site checker, like this one here. (Please note: these are not always accurately read.) Keywords are key! Keywords are what people use to search for what they need. It’s good to pepper your website with keywords to get people to find you. There are a few ways to find keywords, but the most effective is to use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool. A great way to add plenty of keywords to your website is to create a blog about your industry. Like this one here! This is a great way to reach out to customers, prospective customers, and other people you wish to market to. Link to other pages within your website (for example: “Contact Us Today” should link to your Contact page), as well as to other quality websites. If you link to other quality information hubs, Google’s algorithm sees that and promotes you. Make sure the website you’re linking to contextually makes sense on your blog or page. Fix any broken links on your website. Often times, other websites will change their navigation, so the URLs may change and break. You can check to see if you have broken links by using this tool. However, please keep in mind that broken link checker tools are not always accurate and may show links that are on the backend, but not on your visible website. If you use WordPress, we highly recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin. If you use other CMS platforms, there are also SEO plugins like EFSEO for Joomla or Magento SEO Suite Ultimate. However, we have not tested the latter two and cannot vouch for them. Use keywords as alt-tags on your images. This is much easier to do on WordPress sites, as you can just click on the image and add it in the alternative text box. WordPress then automatically adds it to your HTML. If you have a static HTML site, you can find the instructions here.  Make sure your website loads quickly. If it loads slowly and your bounce rate goes up, your SEO rankings go down. To make your website load faster, optimize image sizes, cache plugins and/or get rid of plugins you’re not using. There are also many other ways to reduce your load time. Have sufficient contact information throughout your website. Search engine crawlers pinpoint these and determine that you’re more trustworthy, which boosts your SEO ranking. Give a lot of thought to your meta titles and meta descriptions. They should include keywords and be short descriptions about the page you’re trying to get them to click on. This will be the first call-to-action that people see regarding your company. Search engines don’t rank meta descriptions, but the more people click on your site, the higher your SEO rankings get. We hope these basic steps will help improve your website’s ranking, getting you more viewers and customers! There are also many other ways to improve your Search Engine Optimization. If you have any questions about your SEO or your website, please do not hesitate to contact the Nerds. We are always here to help!