The first step in launching your business is to create a website. Then, to boost your business, you need to improve your SEO (or natural search engine optimization), which refers toall the techniques that will enable your website to be correctly identified by Google and therefore visible to your prospects.

An effective SEO approach means respecting Google’s standards when it comes to the technical elements of your site’s creation and implementing a structured process for producing quality information.

Technical tips to boost your SEO

The arrival of smartphones and tablets has fundamentally changed the way we consume the Internet.
On average, 50% of your visitors are now on cell phones.
In addition to implementing “responsive design” , which is imperative, it’s important to look at the loading performance of your website’s pages.

Know that after 2 seconds, your visitors leave your site.
Web browsing on a cell phone is very different from browsing on a desktop.

With Internet coverage still largely limited, it’s extremely important to optimize your web page load times.

There are 3 simple steps to take:

– Compress your images: compressing an image can reduce its weight by 70-80%, with a direct impact on the loading speed of your web pages.
There are a number of free software programs available that make this optimization possible without any loss of quality.

– Test your page load times: Google offers a free tool for this, but you can also use software such as Pingdom which, in just a few seconds, will simulate the load speed of your pages and provide you with any optimization tips.

– Use modern web design software: you need to respect the best programming rules, offer page caching…

Security is becoming increasingly important on the Internet.
As of this year, Google wants to make it mandatory for all websites to enable theexchange of encrypted data, and therefore to use HTTPS.
Until now, this protocol was only used for e-commerce sites.

To achieve its goals, Google is now penalizing the SEO of sites that are not HTTPS compliant.

Implementing this protocol is a technical project akin to website migration.
It’s an opportunity for you to modernize your site and use website creation software.
This will enable you to be more efficient and more autonomous in your animation.

Marketing tips to boost your SEO

Know your keywords: that’s the basics, you might say, but the vast majority of companies still don’t use their keywords in a relevant way, often because they don’t know them.

If you want your site to perform well, you need to determine your keywords.

What’s the right approach?

a) Ask your prospects and customers what they type on the Google search bar to find you.
They’ll give you 10 – 20 – 50 keywords on which to position yourself.
If you haven’t launched your business yet, go to a trade show and listen to your competitors’ salespeople.
Good salespeople speak their customers’ language, so they use keywords.

b) Analyze your competitors’ most effective sites.
Take the keywords, type them in and analyze the first links proposed by Google.
If they’re first, they’re the best.
This will enable you to discover other keywords that will enrich your lexical field.

c) Validate your approach using an analysis tool. By way of example, here ‘s an easy-to-use, high-performance software package.

Liven up your site ! A website is your company’s showcase.
It needs to be animated and offer new information on a regular basis.

A good rule of thumb is to publish an article of at least 300 words every week . This shows Google that you care about your site, and that it’s important to you.

What’s more, this will enable you to use your keywords to reach your prospects.

Producing a 300-word article a week is just a question of discipline and willpower. It takes a maximum of 2 hours, which, considering what’s at stake, is a very worthwhile investment.

Build inbound links to your website. Your site will perform even better if other sites with authority in your field of activity link to a page on your site. As always on the Internet, there’s no magic involved, just a process:

– Identify the sites you’d like to be in contact with and check their relevance.
Every website has a rating (formerly known as Page Rank).
The Moz index defines a site’s performance on a scale of 1 to 100.
A backlink to a site with a higher rating will reinforce your authority in the eyes of the search engines.

– Contacting target websites: good websites never offer to pay to set up a link.
They do it because they know you can make a difference.

– Take care with anchors (the words on which backlinks are placed): these words must be descriptive of the content of the page to which you’re going to encourage site visitors to go.

These simple rules don’t take long to implement.
After a few months’ work, you’ll notice a marked improvement in your performance.

This article was written by F M, partner at Orson.io