Proper search engine optimization for your company may feel intimidating, but the fact is that having a website alone is not enough in today’s market.
Your business’ website should provide positive ROI for your brand, and while design can effectively engage audiences and potential customers, attracting users to your website to gain more traffic for the first time requires pairing great website design with the right SEO strategy.
In order to make sure that your leads and conversion rates see noticeable increases, make sure that you’re addressing these search engine optimization best practices:
1) Don’t Design Your Website in Flash
Despite the fact that Flash may provide a pleasant experience for desktop users, the technology that makes it so attractive and engaging is completely undetectable to search engines and visitors who come to your site from an iOS mobile device.
You’ve undoubtedly heard about the high-end apparel company that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a brand-new Flash website, only to have it disappear from Google search results – even for their own keywords.
Occasionally used Flash components are still acceptable, but developing your website in HTML5 allows for content to be more easily crawled and indexed by search engines crawl bots.
2) Page Layout
One of the most important ways to optimize each page of your website for search is to use appropriate tags on every piece of creating quality content.
It is critical for search engines to understand what subjects and keywords are the most relevant to your page.
You may assist search engines by correctly labeling the text that forms your headers, subheaders, paragraph content, and any other text you may have on a webpage.
The tag optimization process should start with a page’s title tag. While users won’t always see it on a page, each title tag needs to be unique to a single page so that you can ensure that you don’t have multiple pages vying for the top spot on the same keyword research.
Search engine rankings may rank two or more pages for the right keywords at lower positions than the position a single, optimized page would be able to reach if the title tags for a number of pages on your website are identical, making it much harder for your website to attract more organic traffic.
Certain words on a title tag, such as a location or brand name, can be duplicated across numerous pages, but ensuring that no two title tags are entirely the same will enhance your SEO ranking for a range of keywords that attract varied types of qualified visitors.
Although the title tag of a website is widely regarded as the most essential aspect of the site layout to consider when optimizing text for SEO rankings, other aspects of a page should not be neglected, including the “h1” tag, which should include keywords that are relevant to the subjects covered by the page.
Moving down the page, subheaders should be labeled with “h2” and “h3” tags, as appropriate, and should include relevant keywords whenever possible.
Using paragraph (“p”) tags on the text and even using “strong” tags on bolded words, and “li” tags for lists, can also help to more clearly define a page’s focus to search engines and can increase a page’s ranking for relevant keywords.
3) Alt Image Tags
The goal of every website is to rank highly in search engines. The content on your site, however, matters just as much for Local SEO. You can make or break your website’s SEO by employing the correct purpose keywords and phrases throughout it. You also need to remember that images are an important source of SEO value on a website. In order to get
When this image is uploaded to your online store, it improves the overall shopping experience of customers, but naming the picture “18875524.png” provides little value in online searches since it doesn’t define what the photograph is called in the filename. Make sure that you uploaded high quality images as well.
If you spend a few seconds to come up with a file name, “brown-leather-messenger-bag.png,” and include an appropriate image alt tag such as: “Brown Leather Messenger Bag,” your photograph may rank highly when people perform picture searches. Get more traffic to your website as well.
Naming your pictures correctly and adding img alt tags is another entry point for people seeking for images on your website, so it should not be overlooked.
4) Using Video Effectively
Video can also assist your website’s overall SEO. If you take the time to optimize them properly, incorporating and embedding YouTube into your website may provide significant benefits.
By including thorough description text in your video titles and relevant keyword terms, you may improve your visibility in search engine results pages.
You can also generate new source of referral traffic by including links back to your site in video description text.
YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google, with greater than Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and Ask combined!
Take advantage of the benefits that YouTube may provide, and you’ll be able to construct a valuable second point of contact for your online business.
When you can effectively blend all three media types on a page, it’s a significant error to restrict yourself to only images, videos, or text.
For example, every Friday they release a 10-minute video series on their website called “Whiteboard Friday” (Moz), an SEO and online digital marketing firm.
In each video, a specialist explains the most recent Google updates and explores creative SEO strategies in a very easy-to-understand format.
A typical “Whiteboard Friday” landing page contains an “h1” tag that informs crawlers and visitors what the topic of the page is.
There’s also a photo from the video that includes much of the same information, and it’s appropriately labeled and tagged so you can find it in an image search.
A word document with a video transcription in plain text is included. This page also includes a video transcripniation in plain text, which aids search crawlers understand what was discussed in each video by helping them to crawl the videos.
Crawlbots are unable to comprehend the material covered in each video on their own, and therefore need text to grasp what they’re about.
5) Infographics
Infographics are a creative and interesting approach to teach people about subjects that may otherwise appear dry or confusing.
It’s easy to forget that while infographics are an excellent piece of content to include on your site, they may also draw links from other websites.
Well-known websites that link to your infographic (and your website) can improve the domain authority of your site by demonstrating to Google and other search engines that you’re creating outstanding stuff, which users believe is worth highlighting on their own sites for their website visitors.
As a result, search engines will rank your content higher in search queries, which can help generate more leads and brand recognition for your local business.
6) Mobile Optimization
By the end of 2014, mobile and tablet traffic had already claimed a significant portion of all internet activity.
If you haven’t already, checking to see if your website is optimized for mobile devices is crucial if you want it to improve quickly in Google’s search results.
You’re losing out on a potential customer who would have had their needs better met with an optimized mobile presence if visitors to your website are coming via a search query and have a bad experience that causes them to leave.
This will lower your search engine rankings for a keyword or phrase that is critical to your business if it persists over time. Users will depart your website as soon as possible, leaving you vulnerable to losing potential customers or prospective customers to your competitors.
7) Search Engine Optimization SEO Preservation
If you’re redesigning your website and some of your pages have changed to a new URL, implementing a 301 redirect is absolutely vital.
A 301 redirect will automatically make sure that all of the link value your old pages accumulated is passed on to the new page by instructing search engines and other web crawlers about it.
It’s also important to note that Google doesn’t count a move as a search engine update turnaround if there was no previous domain name – so be mindful of this!
It’s also a good idea to include tracking parameters in your website so that you can monitor how successful it is. It prevents users and search engines from getting lost, ensuring that your new pages maintain the keyword positions of previous ones.
There’s More to A Good Website Than Beautiful Design
While it is tempting to just concentrate on design in creating your own site or website, implementing appropriate SEO is also essential.
At times, it can be overwhelming to try and think about SEO as a general concept that needs to get done without thinking about individual, actionable tactics like blog content, content marketing, and relevant keywords to gain high quality traffic for your website.
However, by breaking SEO down into distinct issues that must be addressed, you may ensure that your website adheres to industry standards while also assisting you in reaching online business or small businesses objectives.
By adhering to the best SEO Tips and staying on top of Google’s algorithm updates and Search Engine algorithms, you can be sure search engines are helping you to maintain and increase your online business website’s rankings, leads, and conversion rates.