Search Engine Optimization is the most crucial factor you need to consider if you want to gain more visitors to your business website without spending a few dollars for each visit.

Pay-per-clicks will give you loads of visitors per month if you have the budget. But why pay for traffic when you can get it for free? And how will your business thrive if you run out of budget?

No one wants to operate a stream-and-dry business model whose leads and conversions depend solely on your budget. As a small business, you don’t need to spend half or more of your profits on ad campaigns to look for new clients.

You can find all of them for free through organic search engine traffic. Organic traffics are targeted traffic coming from search engines like Google to your website. It’s absolutely free. You can gain this sort of traffic and gain newer leads, make more sales, or grow your brand popularity by optimizing your website.

Search Engine Optimizations are all the actions you can take to increase your website visibility on search engines results’ page. The higher you rank, the more visible your website will become. Below we have outlined some of the top SEO tips you can apply right away on your website for better traffic.

2019 SEO checklist for any business website

Keyword research

Keywords are the questions that people ask Google. Whenever they want information on a particular subject, people usually turn to search engines with a string of phrases.

The search engine then searches billions of website pages and finds the pages that best answer the queries. It returns these results in the form of queues. The best result takes the number one position and the second and so on.

When you are starting with SEO, your very first step should be to anticipate the phrases that people commonly use to search for information related to your niche and then carry out a keyword research to find the volume of search per month behind each keyword phrases.

Keyword competition research

After getting your list of keywords and the volume of search per month, you might want to carry out and analysis of the level of competition there is for those keywords.

Chances are the keyword you came up with already has some other businesses already dominating the search engine result pages.

As such, you’ll have a competition. The purpose of the competition analysis is to check if you can beat the competition or if it’s just another hopeless fantasy.

Most times, when it comes to competition analysis, you might want to make use of a keyword tool to help you do the analysis. It’s a lot cheaper compare to the hassle of doing it manually and will save more of your time.

Writing a keyword-focused content

If you have completed your keyword analysis and found the competition to be relatively average and one you can beat with time and better content, then its time for you to start writing keyword-focused content.

Writing keyword-focused content doesn’t exactly mean stuffing your contents with the keywords at every opportunity you get.

In fact, search engines have a way of checking the keyword density of your website, and if it looks too spammy, your site risks been blacklisted.

The best way to write a keyword-focused content for your website is to use the keyword in the first and last paragraph and then a few times in between. Above all, only use the keyword where it flows naturally with the rest of the sentence. Never force them in.

Adding keyword in page title

Your page title is different from the heading of your website page. It is the title of Google displays on the search result page. Make use of your keyword in the Meta title. Once again, don’t force it in. It must flow naturally with the rest of the words and make sense when it is read.

Adding keyword to the header sections

When it comes to optimizing websites for search engines, headings are fundamental. Ensure you make use of the H1 heading for your page title.

The H2 heading for major subsections within the article. The trick here is to use the next lower heading when you create a subsection within the higher heading. This makes your post easier to read.

Search engines also love sections and subsections within a post. You can make use of your keywords in some of the subheadings but not all so it wouldn’t come across as spammy to search bots.

Keyword in Meta description

Your Meta description is the brief snippet of text search engines display immediately after your post titles in its search result page. When optimizing for search engines, ensure you write your search description and make sure it gives a good summary of the post on your website.

It should be a teaser, something to allow your searchers want to click through your link on the search result page. Add your keyword to the description where it fits.

Adding keywords to image name and alt title

Google Image search is a whole search engine dedicated to searching images on the web. When adding images to your post, ensure you rename the images or videos with the keywords you want to rank.

For images, you can also make use of the alt tag. The alt tag is the phrase you want search engines to display when the image is not available.

Keywords in post URL

Never make your website URL a string of meaningless alphanumeric or symbols unless you’re not looking for traffic from search engines.

For more visibility on search engines, it’s recommended that your permalinks should be readable to humans.  As such, only set your permalinks to the mode that displays your post title instead of a bunch of meaningless string.

Linking post internally

Linking your post to one another on the same website is referred to as internal linking. This not only ensures that visitors can easily move from one helpful post to another but can easily increase the time visitors spend on your website.

Search engine crawlers will also find it easier to move from one post on your website when they come to crawl and index your webpages.

Linking post externally

Do not be afraid to link to other websites – even if they are your competitors. Link to post that you think your users might find useful and is relevant to the topic you’re discussing.

Google loves it when you link to rich resources and will reward you for it. Others will also link to yours when they find it useful, thereby increasing your authority in your niche.