Whether you’ve just started accepting online orders or are hoping to lure more people to an established eStore, getting website traffic is one of the toughest nuts to crack. Understanding a few SEO basics is crucial to increasing the number of people who visit your site.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of steps you can take to ensure that your website appears in search results.

The good news is that most SEO strategies cost nothing if you are willing to put in the work.

Start with these 4 SEO basics
Search engine optimization is a deep, deep rabbit hole; you can find more articles about how to do it here. But these are the basic steps:

Build your website on a solid foundation

Build your website on a solid foundation
Search engines like Google use several factors to decide which pages to show whenever someone types in a search query. Many of these factors depend on your website structure, such as:

Whether your VP Manufacturing Production Email Lists website is mobile-friendly
How quickly your pages load
If your site is secure from data theft
How easy it is to find information on it
If your website is built on a poor foundation, your web pages may not be listed by search engines. Below are two important steps you should take.

Use a reputable site builder
SEO Basics Man Sitting at Laptop Holding Phone

The best website builders come with features that improve SEO, such as:

Choose a good web host
Page speed is crucial to SEO, as people have little patience for slow websites. In fact, most people will abandon your website if it takes more than two seconds to load!

Hosting is what makes a website visible on the internet; every website must have it

A good web host will ensure your website loads fast and has little to no downtimes; that is, your website stays online 99.9% of the time.

Note: With web builders such as GoDaddy’s Online CRB directory Starter Bundle and Websites + Marketing, this type of high-reliability hosting is built right in.

2. Choose the right keywords
Keywords are at the heart of search engine optimization. They are the phrases and words people use when searching for products, services or information on the internet. If you weave specific keywords throughout your website, then it is more likely to show up in search results for those keywords.

How do you achieve this?

Keep user intent in mind when choosing keywords
Never choose keywords at random. Always consider if you can provide the answers or solutions the searcher is looking for. This is because websites with relevant content outperform those with poor content.

For example, let us say you sell silk sarees. You would want to use these words in the headlines, subheads and descriptive text on your web pages (more on this later). This will tell Google what your website is about, making it more likely the search engine will present your site when a person types in silk sarees.