Search Engine Optimization is the backbone of any website or blog. It is not just about search engines, it’s about making your site better for your visitors. You want people to enjoy your site and keep coming back. Here are a few tips to get you started with Search Engine Optimization.
- Regardless of what anyone tells you QUALITY content is still the king. In the good old days people used to be able to flood their content with keywords even though it didn’t make sense. This has changed since Google Panda and Google Penguin Updates 1- 3. Search engines now love content that is written with people in mind and not content overrun by keywords. People love reading good quality content; it can be helpful, informative and entertaining. So let your writing flow.
- Add quality images and videos whenever possible. For these to work toward your Search Engine Optimization you need to do this correctly and complete all the image attributes. Add a title tag, caption, and alt text. This way if someone searches for an image your image has a chance of coming up and in turn may lead people to come check out your site or blog.
- The Title tag and Meta tags are the behind the scenes heroes of your site. They should be unique to the specific page. These are pieces of code that look something like this
<title> My Site </title> <meta name=”description” content=” Describe Your Site Here” /> <meta name=”keywords”content=”Combine title and description”/>
Your title tag should be 60 or less characters (not words) and contain your main keywords for the page. People tend to just put the title of their site in the title tag, this is wrong. You will be missing out on a great opportunity for SEO. If you are regional business alternate keywords and region you are targeting. For example if you are an electrician working in Manhattan the title tag of the home page could look something like this:
“New York Licensed Electrician Manhattan Electrical Work NYC “
Your description should be about 30 words describing your site. Be precise and make sure you contain information about the content on the specific page. The keywords are just a combination of your title tag and description.
- The last tip is having the right sitemap. There are two sitemaps that are very helpful; the static sitemap and the XML sitemap. The static sitemap is a page that has links to every page on your site and the XML can be creating using several online tools. If you use both sitemaps all of your pages will get indexed by the search engines quickly.
In upcoming posts I’ll share more advanced tips, but in the meantime be sure to take those four steps to get you started on the right path to search engine optimization.
Do you have techniques you use to improve your SEO results? Share with us in the comments!
