You know exactly what your organisation does and what your website offers its users. This information has probably become second nature to you, but first-time visitors to your site won’t know this. As such, make sure you don’t forget to tell them what you do.

As soon as new site visitors arrive at your website the first thing they need to know, before anything else, is what you do. You can talk all you like about how great you are, but unless you spell out what you actually do, they won’t even know what you’re so great at! This oh-so-overlooked yet such basic of information can be communicated to your site visitors in a number of different ways:

Page title

Don’t just use the page title to tell me who you are; tell me what you do too. If your company is called Bloggs Ltd don’t only place the words, ‘Bloggs Ltd’ in the page title as there’s plenty of room for more information. If Bloggs Ltd sells widgets, a good page title might be: ‘Bloggs Ltd - Buy widgets online’.

Note in this example, ‘Buy widgets online’ was used to describe what Bloggs Ltd does, and not ‘Widget seller’. When describing what it is you do be sure to speak the language of your users, and don’t talk from your point of view. From your point of view you sell widgets, but from their point of view they want to buy widgets online, so do bear this in mind when authoring the page title.

The page title is the first thing that appears on screen, and especially on dial-up modems can be the only thing that displays for the first 10 seconds or so. For many web users this is the first piece of content they’ll read on your site.

The page title is also very important for search engines, which place more importance on the page title than any other on-page element. Descriptive page titles are also essential for blind web users utilising screen readers, as it’s the first thing that gets read aloud to them upon arriving at the page.

Tagline

A good tagline is one of the most important usability features on any website. A good tagline should be explanatory and not vague, clear and informative and about four to eight words in length. A tagline is different to a company slogan, in that the former describes what the organisation/website does whereas the latter is designed to evoke certain feeling or create a brand.

‘Priceless’ and ‘I’m loving it’ are slogans by Mastercard and McDonald’s respectively - they differ from taglines because they don’t describe what the organisation does.

Taglines are so important because no matter on what page site visitors enter your website, they’ll always be able to quickly gain an understanding of what your organisation and website offers. This can be especially true for site visitors coming into internal pages from search engines - by telling these site visitors what you do through the tagline, they may be more likely to explore your site beyond the initial page on which they enter.

Taglines are also good for search engine optimisation, as they appear on every page right at the top of the page, an area on to which search engines place importance.

Main heading

The main heading on the homepage is one of the first pieces of text web users notice, especially on clean well laid out websites. Sticking a ‘Welcome to our website’ may seem to be friendly and welcoming to you, but to task-driven site visitors it doesn’t help in any way shape or form. A quick summary of what you do and/or what the website offers, in just four or five words can be highly effective (and very search engine friendly too!).

Opening paragraph

Perhaps the most important place on the homepage to tell your site visitors what you do, the opening paragraph must be short, succinct and straight-to-the-point. Just one sentence is enough to put across this most basic yet fundamental of information.

When writing this opening paragraph, remember to front-load the content (this rule actually applies to every paragraph on the website). Front-loading means putting the conclusion first, followed by the when, what, where and how.

Don’t write a story with a start, middle and conclusion - generally speaking on the web, we scan looking for the information that we’re after so put the conclusion first. This way, site visitors can read the conclusion first, which in this case is what your organisation actually does. If they want to know any more, they can then continue reading or jump to another section of the page. (To see front-loading in action, read any newspaper article.)

Exceptions

So, does every website need to tell users what the organisation does in these four different places? Well, not necessarily. We all know what Mastercard and McDonalds do, so it could definitely be argued that websites for household names need not explicitly say what they do. What these sites should do instead is tell us what the website offers, and this message can (and should) be put across in any of the above four ways - how else will site visitors quickly be able to find this out?

Conclusion

People are going to visit your site who don’t know what you do. Before you can even begin selling to them you must tell them what your organisation and website does. In addition to fulfilling site visitors’ immediate need (finding out what you do) you’ll also be boosting your search engine rankings. If your organisation is a household name, then instead of explaining what you do, it may be wise to tell site visitors what they can do on your website.

In order to be successful online, you’ll need to have a basic understanding of how to rank in search engines. Optimizing your pages for a search engine can maintain your priority in your keyword category, leading to more clicks for your website, which usually means more revenue. Here are a few SEO tips about your website tags, to ensure the success of your website.

Title Tag
This tag simply tells search engines what your page is about. These words are what’s at the very top of your browsers’ screen. The title tag is crucial when it comes to on-page optimization and should include as many of your main keywords as possible while remaining under 63 characters in length. This ensures your title will appear in its entirety in Google.

Meta Description Tag
This tag is for a brief description of your website. You should write this as if you were marketing your website to a stranger, inviting them to check it out. It should be no more than 140 characters. You should include several of your keywords here without being spammy and unreadable. Making your description stand out can work wonders in a crowded niche.

Backlinks
One of the most important keys to getting a higher ranking in a search engine like Google is building quality links from other relevant sites. Google essentially counts these organic links as votes for your site and ranks your site accordingly. Experts say you should include main keywords in anchor text from these links in order to make the most from backlinks.

Associated Keywords
Because keywords are how consumers find your site, you should be aware of all keyword terms which could direct them to your site. You should be able to find several variations of your main keywords in order to completely conquer the market. You can use the tilde ~ command in Google to find out the various keyword phrases which are associated with your selected keywords in Google.

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of improving the website’s ranking in the search engines like Google and Yahoo.  There are two major factors of SEO i.e. the On-page and Off-page optimization.  SEO is the most effective way to promote your website online. There are thousands of search engines but only two of them i.e. Google and Yahoo will bring you traffic.  

A website can rank well in the search engines if it follows the ranking guidelines of the search engines. A well ranked website with specific targeted keywords gets good number of visitors that can converts into customers. There is so much outdated information on the internet about SEO.  Make sure you are using up-to-dated information and SEO techniques.  Here are some of the most useful SEO tips and techniques.

• Build a clean, content rich and user friendly website.
• Regularly update your website with the useful contents.
• Use keywords and key phrases naturally in your content.
• Use your targeted keywords in page title, description Meta tags.
• Avoid unethical SEO techniques.
• Use short and keywords rich URLs.
• Build one-way links naturally and the best way to build the links is to create useful, highly researched and interested content, the people will link to you naturally. There are some other link building techniques such as directory submissions, social bookmarkings, article distribution, contextual link building, etc… All the above mentioned worth considered in the link building process.
  
• Use XML sitemaps and add them into your Google Webmaster Account.

There is a world of difference between the writer who knows how o search engine optimize his website using articles and the other writer who though is very good but does not know how to write a search engine optimized article. Articles that are search engine optimized are simply those that are keyword rich.

They have the particular keyword targeted, appear a number of times. Thus, making it appear and rank high in the search engines. Writing search engine optimized articles takes a lot of practice. But once you get the hang of it, nothing can stop your website from ranking higher.

To write a SEO article, the very first thing I need you to look at is study this article. It is an example of an article that is optimized for the keywords “SEO” and “Search engine optimized”. You see how many times, these phrases have been mentioned in this article?

Yes, that is how you get to start writing those keyword rich articles that you hear about all the time. Initially, it will come across as hard. But with time, you will find it easier to do. Note that it is important that you do not make the article look like it is a spam article. Your keywords should not be more than 5% at best. This is also known as keyword density. This means that if your article is a hundred words, the number of times the keyword should appear should at best be five times.

Besides that, you have to learn how to write so that the thought will flow. This is the mistake many people make. You write a perfectly search engine optimized article only to find nobody is interested in it. This is because while writing for the search engines, you also need to write for the people who will be reading your website. Never forget that and you are on your way to writing the perfect search engine optimized article.