Improve your Website and Increase your SEO

There are many ways that you can improve your website, without having to do a completely new redesign.

Improve your SEO

When is the last time you had someone take a look at your website and offer tips on how to improve your website rankings in the search engines? If you're a small business the answer is probably, not recently. There are many aspects of a website which need to be taken into consideration not only during development of the initial website, but periodically throughout the year as well. Your websites

is very important. When you visit an About Us page on a website, what does the URL typically look like? If it looks like

then SEO wasn't taken into consideration when the website was originally developed. When a Search Engine crawls your website it not only looks at the content on the page, keywords, description, and title tags but it looks at the URL structure as well. If a Search Engine crawls your website and sees

in the URL it has no idea what that means. However if the same Search Engine crawls a website with

in the URL then it will know that the page it's currently looking at is an About Us page. The URL structure should be readable and make sense for the specific page. Another important aspect of a website is the

that it provides. If you have a website for a Travel company for example, you'll want to have some pages specific to the types of Travel that your company provides. Stuffing your website with Keywords, Title Tags, and Description tags isn't enough anymore to keep your website at the top of the list.

Add some Flare

Does your website look like it came out of the 90's? We won't target small businesses, but if you are a small business the likely answer is 'yes'. Don't worry you don't need to spend thousands of dollars for a completely new redesign. There are things you can do to improve your website without spending that kind of money. If your website was created in the 90's (or even later), you may be able to change the color scheme slightly on your website to bring it more up to date. Is there an ugly Green, or Blue that you made the background and now realize it's hard to read the text on the page? Updating these colors is a simple change that can change the look and feel of your website instantly. Do you have any photos on your website? What about updating the photo gallery to something more modern? There are many online gallery examples out there, but choosing the right one for your particular scenario is important. Here's a

website

 that has just a few of the galleries that are out there On the home page what about adding a slider? Often times a website will have a header image on the front page, but adding a slider adds more flare to an existing, and maybe boring home page. After all this is the first page your potential customers will see. A slider we like is

Nivo

, which has a WordPress plugin (if you have a WordPress website), but also can be used on any platform that would support Jquery. Also, don't forget to check out our

Search Engine Optimization

services that we provide as well. We hope that these tips will provide you with some ideas on how you can improve your website in 2013 without breaking the bank. Your partner in Developing Websites that Save Time and Money, Mark Lane President Eco York, LLC