In this day and age, it is practically a requirement to optimize your website as much as possible so that it can do well on the internet and serving your clients or patients.
Your website must have content that serves your niche, but it will not do well if you do not prepare it or optimize it for the web and your audience.
We’ll go over 5 things to optimize your website and advice for implementing the tips into your own site.
Optimizing your HTML should be the first step in optimizing your website overall. You’ve got to use code that will make your website more descriptive and will even help search engines and users find your site more easily. You can cover both of these bases by using META tags. These are simple tags that are placed in between the HEAD tags in your HTML document to list the description of your website and provide relative keywords for your site. Additionally, you should also be using TITLE tags, HEADING tags, and other tools such as CSS to make your site easier to manage and more smooth running. Of couse, don’t forget to describe images and links as well. Make sure that your pages load fast, and that they show up correctly in different browsers. You can use Google Page Speed and BrowserShots for this. Talk to your webmaster if you are new to HTML – but learn more about it at HTML school.
SEO is another big part of optimizing your website. It simply stands for “search engine optimization” and it is a huge part of getting your site noticed and high on search engine results. Using SEO on your site, and with partner links offsite, you will target certain keywords that have low competition from other web sites but high demand from people who use search engines, and within your market. For example, a keyword like “dentist” is too vague, “santa monica dentist” is better, but “santa monica family dentist”, or “santa monica cosmetic dentist” will improve your chances to be found, if done right. Your web analytics will also help you with figuring out what keyword phrases might work for you. There are other components to SEO, but it is imperative that you use it to optimize your site.
Content is a big deal if you wish to optimize your site. Your content must be seen by readers and the actual search engine as valuable and related information for it to perform well at all. Recycled content that can be found on any other site of the same subject normally won’t do well. Remember, you want your site to offer something to the web that it doesn’t already have. Stay focused on your clients, and do some research in your market to find out what they will need. If you can find “gaps” in the information, you can move ahead very quickly. Don’t be like everybody else, and try including video content as well. You have a YouTube account, right?
Your choice of layout for your website is critical for optimization and user friendliness. This refers to the type of navigation you use, how quickly your readers can find a piece of information that they’re looking for on your website, how information is displayed/presented and so much more. It’s important that your layout works for your site because it will keep readers coming back for more. You can use your existing web analytics to find click patterns, and find out where they navigate to, and where they abort. A bounce-rate study may help you as well. Check out others in your space that are ranking high (both in organic and paid) – and find out what’s working. It’s OK to get ideas, but don’t blatantly copy.
Having a call to action is simply wanting your readers to respond to what you’ve given them. You want them to act. For example, if your site is advertising a product, you might have a link at the top waiting for them at all times that reads, “Buy Now.” This is a call to action. It’s important to have a call to action on your site that is constantly visible. Calls to action are imperative because they are much more persuasive than allowing the reader to make the choice for themselves. A great way to find out what the action is on any page on your website is this: “What is the ‘most-desired-action’ I want my visitor to take on THIS page”? Then, answer that… and provide it. And, don’t assume the visitor will know. Make it simple.
You may find some of these to be basic, but we see these issues all the time…And, you must address these points.
Where does your current webpage rank? Are you passing the keyword analysis test?
Back in the day, performing programming tasks and SEO work to rank at top of the first page of Google – well, it was easy. In fact, just making sure you had the right keyword density (number of keywords repeated on a page) was enough to show up fairly quickly. And, if not – just adding some incoming links from article directories would do the trick.
In 2011, with the social inter-webs, time have certainly changed. While the core concepts of SEO (content+links) are still true, you’ll have a hard time getting listed on the first page of Google without using different strategies.
What can you do?
Stated simply (there’s more to it) – link building pertains to the SEO model where one way back links to a website are made. These are in essence incoming links to your page, and these links act like a VOTE for your page and site.
By creating links from related and authoritative sites back to your own web site you not only inspire additional internet traffic, you can raise your page rank (PR 1-10), and it may help with search website results pages. Some of the most successful link building systems are blogging, forum posting, article marketing and bookmarking and content baiting (writing inspiring content) on related and high quality traffic web sites.
FAST OR SLOW – WHAT’S THE RIGHT PACE?
But – do remember – fast, synthetic development of one way links is suspect so it is much better to form your links steadily as one would expect of a natural site and back link development effort.
It’s much better to use 2 heavy traffic (ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com) article directory sites than to submit your articles to hundreds or maybe thousands of directories as this can create a great quantity of copied content which is devalued by the search site algorithms.
HOW ABOUT DUPLICATE CONTENT?
It’s also a mistake to put articles on your internet site that you have used for repeat marketing purposes because this would create reused content on your site. While you definitely need the advantage of back links to raise your search website results page ( SERP ) rankings, you want to consider other options which can influence your SERP position; like fresh, unique, frequent web copy content.
You can write blog articles on your own blog as well as write comments and postings on other peoples’s blogs that link back to your site.
LINK BAITING
Link baiting is an indirect link building technique in that you don’t immediately place the links, but encourage others to link back to your internet site or, more distinctively, a selected article or page on your internet site. Link baiting is attained by writing interesting, educational, funny or controversial articles that others are probably going to link to from their web sites or blogs. Ask what other info you can offer that may benefit others and lure them to link back to the data.
Discussion, humor, Top 10 lists, How-To articles and controversy are always preferred. Running a web contest is another link bait method, so too is writing free how-to reports, providing unrestricted access to an internet software application, or doing something new on the web that’s interesting or useful and grabs attention. Writing or revising informative articles for online encyclopedias like Wikipedia may also be a good link bait system.
WHAT WORKS FOR YOU?
Link building and link baiting are both effective for SEO, as well as traffic building strategies. If you strategically link one way from topical internet sites back to your own, you’ll gradually enhance your SERP rank as well as increase the number of visitors to your site and so your profits. You can’t optimize your site effectively and forget the significance of back links. It is starting to become more difficult to manipulate Google and other search websites by employing synthetic systems so it is vital to form natural links so as to gain lasting benefits for search site results rankings.
Small businesses need a presence on the internet and that means they must rank decently in the search engines. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) proves to be so helpful. It aids in boosting the presence of the small business’ website in the rankings. From this, a potentially large stream of organic traffic can be tapped to flow to the site. Of course, there’s a balance between traffic keywords and “buying” keywords. We want the most targeted keywords possible, so good keyword research is imperative.
Increasing search engine rankings is based on several factors. Link building and integrating proper keywords into the text of the website remain the most important of components. Thankfully, it is not all that complex to implement such steps. The process is affordable which means your business can earn significant income with less cost than, for example, rising PPC costs, or expensive Media Buys.
Disclaimer: This post is not biased in any way!

Lead Generation with SEO
It is true that you must work with practitioners that know what they are doing here, but SEO (search engine optimization) is truly the top way to generate (quality) leads online. Using this approach, you are optimizing your website (pages!) for search engines and thereby for users to find you. The visitors come to you virtually for free, and your (assumed) decreased cost per lead can and will dramatically increase your business valuation. With the keyword research and marketplace analysis, along with content, usability and links analysis, you can find out what folks are *actually* searching for, other websites (your competitors) they are surfing to, so you can match your site and pages with a high user intent, from natural/organic search. We know that not all are in a buy mode (awareness, research, compare, buy), but if they are – your value proposition overall will be much higher than other means. You can use other traffic tools to help leverage SEO even more, and for the long haul.
“Forty-eight percent of marketers said that search engine optimization (SEO) was the best method for generating conversions online. More than one-half of marketers with budgets over $1 million agreed.”
Statistics and numbers can not deny the facts. Just take a look at this:

Here’s more information on the marketing trends.