While small business owners often focus much of their attention on staying active in social media, they tend to end up ignoring a valuable asset: their website. As many web designers will tell their clients, a company's website should always include search engine-friendly content as well as useful information that is readily accessible. More often than not, getting one's online properties to the top of the Google and Bing SERPs is one of the most important goals in any SEO campaign.

Achieving that goal can be quite difficult depending on how popular a company's relevant keywords are. Although the path to page ranking success can be a long one with plenty of ups and downs, implementing the right qualities and designs into an official company site can bolster any efforts spent towards improving domain authority. The following are just a handful of excellent SEO behaviors that should be found on any website that is looking for better SERP performance.

Make your Company Easy to Contact
As ridiculous as it may sound, few websites actually list much of their contact information out in the open. According to a report from Search Engine Watch, nearly 60% of small business websites surveyed lack a phone number with which interested site visitors can contact them. The same study also claims that less than 20% of websites display links to their Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn profiles. Simply put, there is never a reason not to have this information readily available to visitor. If anything, link clicks to other company properties only serve to strengthen those pages.

Create a Great Landing Page that is Both Concise and Informative
Over the years, I've lost track of the number of websites I've seen that show flashy banners and excessive Flash scripting when I've gone to them. While there is something to be said for visual panache, ultimately heavy page elements only serve to slow down the speed at which a page loads. Although major businesses often introduce their homepage with JavaScript, SMBs should always be striving to reduce page load times to as little as possible. A site's bounce rate, or the percentage of times in which a user leaves a page without visiting any on-page links, is greatly affected by the speed at which a page loads. Webmasters should do what they can to reduce page elements down to the essentials.

Keep your Website's Traffic Flowing through Smart Link Distribution
When businesses try to get their pages higher up in the SERPs, they often do so by focusing on page rankings and domain authority. These statistics are always improved through consistent traffic and link hits. In order to get one's website to climb the search engine ranks, a web designer should always place links to other sections of the site. Of course, these links need to be smartly designed - one should never haphazardly stuff links all over a page. Always set links to other pieces of content which are relevant to the current page or body of text.

With these SEO-focused behaviors in place, a website has a much better chance of seeing improved SERP placement in far less time. For further tips on SEO-friendly website design, I highly recommend that readers contact me directly. I can be reached at jwersits@webimax.com.