31 Oct Get Found Online: 8 tips to raise your website’s SEO
It is important to have your website “spider-friendly.” Your site needs to make it easy for the search engine spiders to find you, categorize you and then raise your organic search engine ranking. That first Google page gets more eyes looking at it than any other. Here are a few things to do to help ensure your company appears on the first page whenever a potential customer uses a search engine.
1. Home page headlines
Your first page, the home page, should have readable text (not imbedded images of words) containing words describing your company and service. Try to integrate keywords someone might type into Google to find a service like yours. Remember, you are writing for a human audience and the spiders will scan these words.
2. Page titles
This is one of the most important on-page factors. Page titles are text on the top of your browser when you’re viewing a website. This is the first thing presented to search engines. The titles help Google spiders find you and categorize your site’s pages. The easier it is for them to find you, the higher the ranking in Google. You can and should use different titles for different pages.
3. Meta tags and short description
These keywords are not as important as most people think. You should obviously include them on the website, but they are not heavily weighted by the search spiders. However, the short description is important to your prospective customer. This paragraph of copy is what shows up in search results in Google and if you have an engaging 2-3 sentences, it can increase traffic to your site.
4. Images
Because search engines can’t see photos on a website, it is important to have the HTML attribute, ALT text (associated text) added to the images. This text allows the search engines to replace your image with associated keywords. As we name each image, separate different keywords in the file name with a dash.
5. Site map
This page organizes all the pages contained in the website and makes it easier for the spiders to easily move through the website, identify keywords in the content and index these for search engines. The site map page is usually just one page that is linked to from the bottom of all the pages and contains a listing of links to the other pages.
6. Domain ownership
For a quick boost to your SEO, make sure your site is registered for at least 3-5 years. A longer period of time means you’re more likely to be taken seriously by search engines.
7. Fresh content
If you want Google spiders to crawl (review) your page more often, regularly keep the website current with fresh content. This is another reason blogs are so popular.
8. Link backs
Google observes how people link to your site from other sites. If your site has lots of traffic going to it from other websites, Google assumes you’re more important than other static sites, and so places you higher in its rankings. People clicking from Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, etc. all create link backs to your site.