If you’re reading this site then you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with SEO and why it’s important for your website. SEO can be a little complicated. There are a lot of factors to consider when search engine optimizing your website, but there are a few universal quick tips you can keep in mind to help get you started.

Title Tags

The title of a page is the first thing any search engine sees when they look at that site. Your title should include keywords relevant to your site whenever possible. You never want to leave the title set to something generic like “home page”. Search engines see millions of pages with generic titles, and as such, having a generic title isn’t going to help search engines to place your page in the right search results pages.

Make Sure Your Page Loads Quickly

Clear your browser’s cache, and refresh your page. Did it load quickly, or did it hang for a few seconds? Repeat this experiment a few times over the course of a day, and see how well your site performs over time. If you’re page is loading quickly most of the time, you don’t have anything to worry about. If your page tends to hang for more than a couple of seconds, then you might want to consider switching hosting providers, or hiring a developer to pour over your code, and look for problems. If a page is unresponsive, search engines will rank it lower than if it loaded quickly.

Original Content

Make sure all of the content on your site is completely original. It’s OK if you’re quoting another article here and there, but if you’re copying entire articles, or running an article that you purchased from someone who sold it to multiple sites, you’re posting duplicate content. Search engines don’t look kindly on duplicate content, and if your site contains a lot of it, you will wind up at the bottom of search results quickly.

A fast-loading page with a strong title, and good, original content will do well on search engines. By taking the time to make sure your pages meet these criteria, you’re ensuring that your site will show up higher in search results. The higher you show up in search, the more traffic you get. The more traffic you get, the more profitable your site will be.