So, you want to optimize your website and get better search engine rankings, but not sure where to start? Making accurate decisions is a critical skill when undertaking an SEO venture. Some businesses, on realizing this, go for an SEO specialist while others decide to undertake the venture by themselves through research and analysis.

Here are six simple and clear-cut steps that will help you with your website optimization:

Keyword research

This is the most important part of the SEO. It is important to build your content and website structure to properly reflect your targeted keywords. You should create a list of all high traffic and long tail keywords within your niche and then create your content around them. Some of the tools that you can use for keyword research are Google Suggested search terms and Google Keyword Tool.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO contains all the SEO variables that you can easily control. As such it revolves mostly around the following three things.

Content

The only reason that people will visit your site is because you have the information that they are looking for. More traffic result in more conversions.

HTML

For each and every content you produce, make sure that the 4 parts of HTML below are optimized.

• Meta description
• Heading tags
• URL structure
• Title tags

Site architecture

Your website should provide a great user experience. This can be done through:

• Making it easy to crawl
• Making it mobile friendly
• Making it fast.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to the procedures that one can employ using links, relationships, and content to improve the search rankings of their website.
The following are the things to look at in off-page SEO.

Build your trust

Building your trust will help Google tell whether your site is legit or not. This can be done through;

• Improving authority
• Decreasing the bounce rate
• Enhance your identity

Link building

This is the most effective and most popular off-page SEO tactic. You should not just wait for people to link to you. Find ways to build external links, increasing the value of your webpages.

The other techniques that you can employ in off-page SEO are:

• Social media integration.
• Participation in forums and boards.

Backlinks

Unknown to many, links are the number one ranking factor apart from content. Make sure that you get high quality, natural (to avoid penalty) links to improve your rankings and gain authority. Links can be built through:

• Create comments on niche related websites and blogs
• Guest posts
• Using info graphics
• Building broken links
• Use of Wikipedia’s dead links

It is also very important to build, aside from external links, internal ones. Good internal linking structure improve the whole user experience.

Know what moves your competition

Competitor analysis is an all-round essential part of marketing. Not only should you analyze your customers’ behavior, but also your competitions’. What strategy are they using? What are their keywords? Are they using social media? Where are their backlinks from?
This is achievable through tools such as SEMrush and ahrefs. You can monitor most of their activities, giving you an advantage.

Track your progress

Now that you already got your long-tail keywords, built your content around them, practiced your on and off-page SEO, it is time to sit back, and monitor your progress. You can track your performance using tools such as Google Analytics.

Final thoughts

Always remember, SEO is not a one-time thing. It requires consistent input, coupled with patience and resilience to get the highest ranking and ultimately traffic and conversions.