8 Ways to Improve Your Visibility Online

Your website can be an asset to grow your business. Here's 8 easy fixes to increase your visibility online. 

By Kyle Patterson, President of THRiVE! Media Group, a Google partner

There are at least 8 easy actions you can take to improve your website's visibility online. By focusing on ranking your site in search engines for keywords that are relevant to your business, your site will begin to get noticed and show up in relevant search results, leading to new visitors to your site. Once visitors come to your site you need to have the right offer and a way to capture leads (but that's a post for another day.)

1) Header tags. Utilize header tags in each page of your website to explain to search engines, what your page is about. By doing a little research, you can find relevant keywords for your industry. Once you know what language people are using to search for your competitors you can begin strategizing around ranking for these keywords and inserting the keywords into the  header of each page. 

2) Image tags. Google and other search engines can tell what a picture is by the image tags. They can read the text associated with each image, but not "see" the image itself. So when you are inserting photos into your site, make sure you are tagging them with relevant keywords and phrases that will show up as people search. 

3) Title of your posts. Your page and post title are vital to include your keyword terms into your website. When your updating your site's content or creating a new post, build your keyword strategy into each title. 

4) Blogging. Frequent updates to your website and consistent quality content helps establish you and your website as an authority in your industry and on your topic. Your posts should focus on helping your target audience with real needs. Understanding your buyer persona and target customer helps to focus your content on what they need to know. Add value to readers and don't just promote your products and services. Help your site visitor by providing "how to" content or practical actions your readers can take. This builds trust with your audience and keeps them coming back for more. 

5) URL Names. By building keywords into your blog post titles, pictures, and URLS you help explain to search engines what your website is all about. Utilize the URL name to show your keywords. 

6) Google +. Google's social network allows your page, updates and website to show in search results. By utilizing frequent updates and linking your site to Google+ and Google+ My Business, Google search results will more prominetly display your content and help people discover your business. 

7) Social Shares. Grow your following and increase web visibility by utilizing social share buttons on your website and let your friends and fans promote for you. When you add value and create content that is practical and helpful, more people are likely to share it. 

8) Inbound Links. By building a link strategy with affiliates, customers and partners linking back to valuable content on your website, search engines recognize this as a "thumbs up" for your website. Search engines track the number of inbound links back to your website and this helps your site rank higher (closer to page 1) of search results for related searches.