Did you know that search is the number one source of traffic for content websites, beating social media by more than 300%?

Furthermore, it’s been found that leads generated from search traffic have a 14.6% close rate, beating direct mail or print advertising which is at only 1.7% close rate.

These are just a couple of statistics that prove why SEO is essential for your business.

Fortunately, we’re giving you 13 free SEO tips below which you can use to improve your website’s online visibility today.

Your Site Structure

1. URLs
Make your URLs more meaningful, so search engines will immediately have an idea what your website is all about. For example, without going to the page, can you guess what’s inside these two URLs?

• www.mystore.com/4142.html
• www.mystore.com/december-promo.html

2. Navigation
User experience is important. When your site’s menu are clear, your categories are descriptive, and your page doesn’t look cluttered, then people will be able to go around your website better, and so does search engine robots.

Your Content

3. Keyphrases
Think about your target market and ask yourself what phrases would they type in search engines, then make sure you have content that will provide them useful information about that.

For example, people with diabetes will not simply search for “diabetes” online, they will however search for phrases like “food for people with diabetes” or “where to buy cheap insulin in Manila” – which means your medical online store should have articles about these.

4. Product Descriptions
If you’re an online store, be sure you have detailed but concise descriptions of your products. People search a lot about product specifications online, i.e. “smallest Samsung tablet with LTE connectivity”

5. Meta Data
Tell your website administrator to put unique and descriptive meta data for your webpages. Some of them can be lazy and skip doing this, some will put the same phrases in all the pages of your site. Avoid this and clear and meaningful meta data information, especially in your title tags.

6. Duplicate Content
Avoid having multiple pages with the same content. While this may seem common sense, but you have to check your website if you provide text-only or printer-friendly versions of a page, give sesson IDs to users, and publish the same articles in different categories. If these can’t be avoided, tell your developer to implement robot exclusions on duplicate pages.

7. Loading Time
Make sure your website loads fast. Our favorite tool is GTmetrix to test for site loading speed.

Off-Site Optimization

8. External Links
Get link referrals from reputable websites through content marketing. Do guest posts in authority blogs, submit contributions to news websites and online magazines, and get listed in popular business directories on the internet – these are some of the strategies you can implement to get external links. Building these links take time, so make sure it’s always in your digital marketing to-do list.

9. More External Links
Aside from content marketing (Tip #8), you should likewise make friends with new media writers such as bloggers and online journalists and pitch to them stories about your business. Regularly reach out to these people and the link they’ll give to you through their publications will definitely boost your SEO.

10. Social Media Links
The number of times that your website gets shared in social media has an impact on your search ranking. So promote your articles on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and other social networks.

Do Analysis

11. Google Analytics
Make sure you have a way to measure your search ranking performance. Our favorite tool is of course, Google Analytics, which is very comprehensive and free. Find which campaigns are giving you the most traffic and conversions so you can invest more into that, and find which ones have poor performance and see how you can improve on them.

12. Experiment
If you stumble upon an SEO tip, don’t immediately implement it on your whole website. Test it first on a single page or small section and see if it works. If it doesn’t, then there’s almost no harm done. If it works, then it’s easier to implement it across your site.

For example, you found an article that says putting a picture of a cat on your website will increase its search rankings, try that first on one page and see if it works. After a couple of months and you see that it does work, then it’s time to upload cat photos to your pages.

We know our example is silly, but you’ll be surprised that some of those SEO tips are as silly as that – and every now and then, one or two of those silly tips actually work. (Btw, the cat photo tip above does work, if you have a website about cats!)

13. Check Your Competition
All if fair in love and war – and in the battle for search rankings – there’s nothing wrong with checking out what your competitor websites are doing. This way, you’ll see what keyphrases they’re targeting, experiments they’re doing and other strategies that might also be useful for you.

Share these tips to your entrepreneur and internet marketing friends because they’ll thank you for it!