by Nailing down a solid search engine optimization strategy is often an attempt at hitting a moving target. The process of developing a successful SEO strategy constantly requires monitoring and tweaking in order for it to achieve the desired results.
Certain strategies that have proven to be consistent best practices, such as choosing the right keywords to feature within a website’s content, are well-known among both digital marketing experts and everyday users. However, other methods of SEO improvement may not be as well-known, but just as simple to implement.
In this post, we’ll focus on those methods that are quick and relatively easy to start practicing right away. So, if you are ready to improve your business’s website SEO performance and improve site rankings on search engines like Google, then these are the strategies you can use today.
Use keywords in images
The right keywords are critical to drawing a search engine’s attention toward your website. Just as you should try to include targeted keywords in other forms of content, including page titles, URLs and the copy within pages, so too should you be including those keywords in the images found on your website.
How do you accomplish this? It’s fairly straightforward: Include image captions that feature the keywords you want search engines to pick up on. Also, as you continue to upload new images to your website, start placing those same keywords in image titles.
Both of these tactics can help the images on your website turn up in web users’ search results more frequently when they are searching for those same keywords.
Include alt tags, also known as alternative text descriptions, in images to take image searchability to the next level. The primary purpose of an alt tag is to provide descriptions of images for text-only browsers and screen readers, but can help with SEO, too.
Give links a look
Search engines place a large amount of influence on quality links that direct to an internal page within your website and others that link to an external source. Better linking practices can have a positive impact on SEO results.
To start, take a look at the links found throughout your website. Find and fix and broken links that result in error pages. There are some online tools that can help with locating broken links, but, as with any online service, make sure the source of the tool is trustworthy. If you are looking for a recommendation, then give W3C Link Checker a try.
Another tried and true SEO linking strategy is to link to other reputable, quality websites that also discuss the topics your website covers and utilizes similar keywords. In exchange, perhaps some of those sites would also link back to your website in return. It doesn’t hurt to reach out and ask.
Write better page titles
What’s the first thing a person looking through search results sees for most organic searches? It’s probably the page titles found in those results.
Now, your page titles should obviously include your targeted keywords, but you also want them to turn those search results into clicks. Basically, you want to craft a headline that grabs attention and improves the click-through rate, or CTR, of search results.
Of course, your first goal for any page of your website is to have it appear on the first page of results on search engines because the number of people who click through to the second page of results is pretty low.
So, the best page titles will piggyback off the keywords that you focus on throughout the rest of your website. From there, consider what titles might entice someone to click through to your website or, better yet, responds to a need or answers a question they might have. That would most likely be the reason they are searching in the first place.
Be sure to keep titles short, though. After around 50-60 characters, search engines may cut off the rest of your page title. The meat of the title needs to be upfront or the entire headline should fit within those constraints.
Improve web page load speed
Search engines, specifically Google, directly reward in their rankings websites with pages that load quickly. A website that loads quickly has a much better shot at getting near the top of the first page of Google search results than one with a lagging load time.
Use tools that can help you determine page load speed and diagnose fixable issues, such as PageSpeed Insights from Google.
Some of the quicker fixes for slow load times are:
- Decreasing image size and compressing images before uploading
- Changing to a better host for your website
- Deleting unnecessary scripts from third parties
Update content more frequently
Search engines want to see websites that are updated regularly with quality content. This helps by suggesting to search engines that a website’s content is still relevant to users’ search queries.
Try to establish a schedule in which new, high-quality content that is optimized with keywords to be published online. One example is to establish a regular blog on the site that covers topics relevant to your business or service.
Not all content must be new, though, to improve SEO performance. A faster solution for website owners and manages may be to edit and refresh older content that may not be performing as well as it once did. This normally doesn’t call for an entire page or post rewrite, but rather a few updated sections to better emphasize targeted keywords or supplements content that is performing well.
Emagine specializes in SEO
Though there are certainly quick ways to improve SEO performance, overall, search engine optimization is something a website owner must commit to over the long haul. That’s why we partner with businesses and organizations to help them achieve better results online and ensure that the right people are finding their websites.
Contact Emagine for a free consultation regarding how we can work together to get your business’s website at the top of the first page of Google search results.
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