4 SEO Tips for the Non-Technical Business Website Owner

If you find SEO confusing, you’re probably asking yourself how in the heck a non-techie business owner like yourself can ever hope to master this ever-changing landscape effectively.

SEO Post-it

photo credit: http://tvorbaweb-stranok.sk / Flickr

The truth is you can’t, there are plain and simply too many things to consider:

  • Creating an interesting blog (that will attract search engine visitors)
  • Page meta tags
  • Alt text
  • Heading tags
  • 301 redirects
  • Google Analytics
  • Site verification

And that’s just a small list of many factors that need to be addressed in the larger scheme of things. Creating interesting content is hard enough. Most business owners don’t have the time or the heart to get into the technical inner-workings of how a website works, nor how to label and tag this, that, and the other thing to make search engines like Google happy.

Truth is though, modern non-technical types have it much easier than past generations of webmasters and bloggers. All modern content management systems allow you to see and optimize your SEO from their relatively user-friendly dashboards.

One of such tools is Wix.

Why Wix?

While I’m not big on making personal recommendations all the time, I’d like to recommend Wix, especially if you have no technical knowledge but want to have your SEO game in order like a pro.

Wix homepage screenshot

Wix is a full-service content management system that hosts your blog or e-commerce website on their own blazing fast servers located all over North America and Europe.

One major upside which I think make Wix stands above the rest is the regular release of new features. The recent ones include the cutting-edge Wix ADI, which lets you use artificial intelligence for designing a custom website based on your parameters. There are other features that I can highlight, but as this article focuses on SEO, I’d like to shed some light on the many Wix SEO capabilities.

You can implement what I have outlined in this article, or find more information from Wix SEO blog posts such as this and this. However, I recommend you to add SEO Wizard app into your backend dashboard (it’s free, by the way!)

Using the app, you can get a step-by-step guide for improving your SEO. Just enter your keywords, and the Wizard will do the rest for you.

Using Wix for adopting SEO best practices

Wix SEO screenshot

Here are four really important SEO best practices that non-techie business owners need to be aware of. You can adopt those using Wix, as follow:

1. Use best SEO practices for URL structure

This is a common mistake made by beginners. You’re so glad you finally figured out how to get your website up, you don’t pay attention to the fact that the URLs on your inner pages look something like this:

http://gregsgardening.com/?p=10303

This type of link structure is known as the “plain” structure in WordPress and has other labels on other content management systems. It isn’t SEO or user-friendly and will look odd to modern visitors who are used to seeing the title of the post in the URL like:

http://gregsgardening.com/how-to-propagate-azalias

Clean, easy-to-understand URLs help search engines identify what content you have to offer that’s of value to their users, so they can index your site and rank you accordingly for your keywords and content.

Using Wix, you can easily optimize your URL structure for search engines, incorporating the best practices in URL structure. The good news is, it’s automatically done for you. What’s more, in response to the needs for SEO-friendly URL structures, Wix continues to make improvements.

You can find more information about the URL structure update here.

2. Make sure you’re fully mobile optimized

Nearly 70% of all users will be visiting your site using a smartphone or tablet. Having your site optimized for mobile is no longer an option – it’s a must.

Wix mobile website builder

There are a number of things to consider when optimizing a website to mobile perfection from scratch. Non-technical types won’t want to waste their time on such things. It’s better to let Wix take care of the heavy lifting so you can concentrate on making your blog or e-commerce site as interesting and comprehensive as you can.

Wix offer a fully managed solution that consists of modern SEO and mobile optimization tools, and access to lightning fast servers is the best way to go if you don’t know the difference between an H1, alt, or meta tag.

3. Ensure all 301s are completed and working properly

If you decide to change your domain name for any reason, you’ll want to understand how to do proper 301 redirect of your site. Why? Because you don’t want to lose all that yummy link juice you’ve worked (or spent $$$) so hard to get for your site over the years. A properly executed 301 passes up to 99% of that link juice to your new domain.

Using Wix to implement your 301 redirects is straightforward: From your Site Manager, just go to SEO > Manage 301 Redirects and start customizing your links. Here’s a guide for that.

4. Page load times need to be seamless

If it comes as a surprise that you have 2 seconds to capture a click from search engine visitors before they move on to the next result on Google and other search engines, you better check how fast your page is loading. Right now.

It’s super important (learn more). This is another area with way too many factors to address in a single article. Optimizing images, scripts, videos, plugins, banners, pop ups, and a slew of other on-page factors will determine how fast your page loads. And that’s if you don’t skimp on hosting speed!

Optimizing your page load times is not a piece of cake, especially if terms like “minifying CSS and JS files,” “using CDN” or other best practice in page load optimization give you a headache. If you want to optimize website load speed, you can use Web crawler by Sitechecker. This tool will help you perform a technical website analysis and identify all critical errors affecting your site’s loading speed.

Using Wix, page load time optimization is done for you: Your uploaded image is automatically optimized. Not only that, your pages will be served via a Content Delivery Network, which will reduce the burden on Wix’ server and, in effect, speed up your page load time significantly.

Conclusion

SEO is darn complex. Even some so-called experts can misinterpret the guidelines outlined by Google and co. The good news is, there are tools out there which can help bringing the most current SEO best practices to you, and let you use available tools to implement the best practices even if you have no idea whatsoever on how to well-SEO your website.

Remember, acquiring SEO knowledge is nice and all, but you need to leverage the available help so that you can be more efficient and effective in your SEO tactics implementation. If you want to know more about Wix SEO, you can check out another Wix SEO Review by speckygeek.com

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