This is a series of SEO related tips and tricks to get your website optimized for the best search engine rankings possible. More and more businesses are looking to improve their search engine rankings. They want their companies to come up first in their given market, or at least on the first page of results. But in order to improve your rankings, you have to understand how search engines like Google go about ranking websites and practice the right search engine optimization techniques to gain an advantage over your competition. Wiz Marketing is an Austin SEO company and is an Austin SEO expert. We will share some of our tips in increasing your SEO in an honest and straight-forward way.

1. SEO from the beginning. You should incorporate SEO planning into your website project right from the get go. Many builders opt for the “build first, ask later” approach and inevitably get fried as a result. Don’t be like the entrepreneur who spent thousands on a marketing and advertising campaign around his new website’s launch which was built entirely using Flash. Save yourself time and money by making SEO a priority right from the beginning which will influence the way the design, layout and content of the website is built and placed. Constantly meet up with your Austin SEO company to ensure that all site elements are addressed, such as tags, links, content, site architecture, URL, code and redirects. SEO matters should always be considered from the website planning and development stage all the way to the maintenance phase and beyond.

Things to take note of:

• Flash-type website is not good for SEO. Spiders from search engines can’t read flash.
• Websites full of graphics and little text cannot rank well, as spiders can’t see images either.
• Focus on building text-based websites. The longer and more useful information there is, the merrier.
• Focus on having only one main keyword per web page.

2. Use the right keywords. Sounds easy? Picking the right keywords to use requires a thorough understanding of what words and phrases your target audience is likely to use when entering search queries and a strong research effort to optimize said words. Stand in their shoes and determine what words they are going to enter to find your website and web pages. Don’t use technical and sophisticated terms; searchers don’t understand what they mean and won’t bother inputting them to find what they want. Instead use layman terms. As mentioned, use phrases that narrow down the focus and attract your intended target audience. Devise a list of words that you think are relevant to your website, and then use keyword research tools to further refine and whittle down the list. Take the following into consideration when deliberating on the choice of keywords:

• Strong relevancy for which you can create content to support and build on.
• Low number of search results and small competition.
• Popular terms that many people use and, hence, a high search volume.

Conduct careful research to find the right balance. You do not want keywords that are so generic that you will have a hard time getting into the rankings (let alone finding your target audience) and yet you also do not want them to be too narrow and specific that no one will search for them. Also, consider the following once the keywords have been chosen:

• For best results, each web page should have 1 main keyword and 4 related keywords at most.
• Support your keywords with relevant text and content, and all of this information should be placed high up on the web page, at the very beginning of the body of content.
• Be sure to include keywords in the following elements: navigation links, headings, all tags (title, description, and meta), and alt text.

Keep the keyword list updated and anticipate cyclical changes when keywords will evolve to suit a particular event or circumstance. Store keywords into an inventory and constantly run keyword research tools on them to see what’s hot and what’s not at any given moment. As your website grows and evolves along with customer needs and wants, so too will your keyword list grow in tandem.

Do not go overboard and saturate your web pages with keywords, hoping to rank high on search engine rankings this way. You may find yourself pushed lower instead. In SEO, keyword density means the percentage of times a particular keyword appears on a webpage compared to the total number of words in that webpage. Spiders that crawl and detect a high keyword density may conclude that you are merely padding your webpage with that keyword (keyword stuffing) to try to attract traffic and they may penalize you by downgrading your search engine ranking based on that keyword. A general rule of thumb is to keep the keyword density around 2 to 4 percent in body content. This is the best range from our Austin SEO experience.

These are the first two tips to get your started on your online business marketing journey in Austin SEO. Wiz Marketing is always here to guide you through if you have any questions about Austin SEO. Stay tuned for our part 2 of the SEO tips series on traffic and content.