Your SEO Guide: A to Z of SEO
Your SEO Guide: A to Z of SEO
Alt text
Every image you post on your website should have alt text. Alt text, first of all is required by law, but also, is a great place for keywords.
Bold key concepts
Search engines crawl your material and look for the concepts that are most important to your website to build kind of like a “profile” for website. To decide what information is most relevant to your site, a search engine weighs headers, bold and italicized words more heavily.
Connect your webpages
To show a search engine that all your content is relevant and interconnected, and to help the search engine crawl your site, you need to link all your web pages together. Plus, this helps users find information faster as well.
Decrease load time
Test the load time of your pages before you make them live. If your pages are slow, do a little troubleshooter and find a way to speed up that load time.
Engines need help
A search engine can only do so much on its own. You need to help it along. We have a whole blog on how search engines work.
Filler words
Be careful about using a lot of filler words in your long tail keywords. The more “to the point” your long tail keywords are the better. Because, people don’t usually type in “what is the best way for me to make banana bread?”. Instead, they’ll likely type “best banana bread” or “how to make banana bread”. Straight to the point.
Generate new content regularly
Building up your SEO takes a lot of time, and one reason for that is that search engines reward websites that generate content regularly. That is one of the reasons that blogs are so popular with companies, and why we encourage our clients to start blogging.
Headers
The words that you put in your headers are super important. H2s and H3s (header 2 and header 3) carry more “weight” than regular text does. So, when you are putting fresh content on your website, be mindful of the wording that you putting into your headers. If you can, try to put your keywords here.
Italicize Key Concepts
Like bolded concepts, italicized concepts are seen as highly important to the search engine. So, be sure that you are italicizing words and concepts that you actually feel are important. But, also, don’t go italicizing everything you see. Remember, your first priority is to write for human eyes not search engines.
Jumbo Pics Are Hurting Your SEO
The speed at which your site loads can either help or hurt your SEO. A slow load time is really problematic, so be sure that you are shrinking down the photos you are sharing on your site. No, I’m not talking about how large it appears on your site. I’m talking about how large it is. Is it 3M or 300K? The larger the image, the more it is going to slow down your site.
Keywords
Keywords are the words or strings of words that people search when trying to find information, so when you write it is important to choose your keywords carefully. Choosing “manufacturing firm” may be good if you already have excellent SEO, but choosing “Milwaukee manufacturing firm” may be better if you are still working on building that SEO.
Local SEO
We highly suggest using a local SEO firm to help you boost your SEO. Yes, there are national corporations that can help you with your SEO, but they won’t know your city like a local agency will.
Mobile Optimization
Search engines reward companies that have websites that are mobile friendly. Why? Because let’s be real, people are on their phones a lot these days. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, you have some serious revamping to do. Chances are that it hasn’t been just your SEO that’s been taking a beating from that kind of a blunder.
Never Buy Backlinks
If you know a little bit about SEO, you may know that having another company stick your URL on their website can really help your SEO rankings. There is a caveat to that, though. The company “tagging” you — if you will — has to be reputable and have good SEO themselves for that to be of benefit to you. Now, some people get it into their heads that they should buy backlinks to boost their SEO. Sounds like a good idea? Well, not really. Spammy sites that backlink you can actually do serious damage to your SEO, burying you in search results.
Organic Searches
Organic searches bring in fresh new visitors who have never heard of your company and/or practice before. And, that is the beauty and aim of optimizing your website. To increase that visibility.
Put Time into Researching Keywords
Don’t just choose your keywords willy-nilly. A little research can go a long way to increase the visibility of your website. If you need a place to start, we recommend Google AdWords.
Quality Over Quantity
The number of backlinks you get matters less than the quality of the backlinks that you receive. We can’t stress this enough.
Readability
Yes, lots of keywords can help boost your SEO, but you need your writing to be readable for users as well. There is no point in having your content be at the top of a search result if your searchers can’t read and understand what you are saying.
SEO Professionals are Helpful
You can do a lot with SEO on your own from educating yourself through blogs (like this one) and other resources. But, even so, no one understands SEO quite like an expert. So, if you need help researching keywords, optimizing your website for mobile or building a blog from scratch, reach out to a professional today.
Tail Length… It’s a Thing
As we stated, the length of your keywords can make a difference in your organic reach. It really depends on your company, industry and location.
URLs Need Keywords Too
When you create the URL for your blog posts and your website pages, be sure that you are paying attention to the wording of those URLs. You can put keywords in your URLs to help boost that SEO.
Very Good SEO Takes Time
You can’t get high search engine rankings in a day. You may not even get them in a year. Two years. But, hard work truly does pay off. Yes, it is a slow going process. But, it is all well worth it when you reach someone new through an organic search.
Website Navigation
The organization of your website can make a difference in how you rank on a search engine. A search engine wants to be able to easily crawl through your website connecting from page to page and reaching all your content with ease. If your pages are all linked up, that helps the search engine crawl your website better which in turn gives you more points with the search engine.
UX Needs to Come First
No matter how much you want to grow your SEO, you have to put your site users first. Your material cannot be just available for cramming keywords. You need to make yourself a resource for users. Those who do best with SEO are those who care about their users’ experiences on their sites.
You Can Use Social to Boost SEO
Linking social media accounts to your website helps users find your site and gives more links leading to your website, boosting that SEO.
Zero to Hero
You can have great SEO! And, we want to help you get there. Reach out to us for details.