- Have web analytics in place.
- While this doesn’t necessarily help improve your appearance on the web, having analytics in place is the very first thing you should do when starting your SEO journey. It helps you understand your user’s experience and allows you to make the necessary changes to your site to improve your rank. Google Analytics is easy (and free) to add to any site.
- Download a plugin to help.
- Sometimes it’s helpful to have a plugin do most of the work for you. Yoast SEO is a great option for WordPress users. It handles the technical optimization of your site & assists with optimizing your content. Download the plugin here or via your wordpress dashboard.
- Link to other websites with relevant content & team up with other companies to link back to you.
- Adding links within your copy and across your website helps search engines understand pages and guide users to the info they need. So when you ad links within your website, and other relevant websites link back to yours, it boosts your SEO. It’s important to understand that links should only be included when it’s relevant and the text that you link should be closely related to the keyword of the page you are linking to.
- Add alt tags and descriptions to all of your images and include the right keywords.
- Not only does adding alt tags to your images allow visually impaired users to ready/understand what is displayed on your website, it also provides a better understanding of the context of your site for search engine crawlers. Best practices are to include descriptive text and also keywords that relate to the photo. Keep in mind that you don’t want to over keyword. Here is an example: Picture of a cupcake.
- Not recommended: cupcake cup cake yummy cake birthday cake dessert sweet treat
- Not great: cupcake
- Good: Tray of cupcakes with print frosting and rainbow sprinkles
- Not only does adding alt tags to your images allow visually impaired users to ready/understand what is displayed on your website, it also provides a better understanding of the context of your site for search engine crawlers. Best practices are to include descriptive text and also keywords that relate to the photo. Keep in mind that you don’t want to over keyword. Here is an example: Picture of a cupcake.
- Keep URLs to 65 characters or fewer.
- Don’t stress if you URL gets a little long but best practice is to try to keep them to 65 characters or less. Keep in mind that various factors like categories in the URL and/or sub folders can expand the length and character count of a URL.
- Give important pages unique titles (don’t duplicate page titles).
- In short; a page title should simply be a phrase that describes the purpose of the page/what it’s about. This helps both the user and the search engines when trying to find the information they are looking for. Keywords int he page title can also help your ranking, however keep in mind you should try to keyword stuff a title and the title should remain to read naturally.
- Add links to hard-to-find pages.
- There’s not a whole lot to this one. Adding internal links within your pages can help web crawlers understand the structure of your website and can make it so hard-to-find pages can be more easily found. Simple as that!
- Fix errors and broken links.
- There are a couple reasons why fixing errors and broken links is very important. It messes with user experience and when a user comes to your site and can’t get to where they need/want to go, they may get frustrated, leave, and never return. It also means they will likely be spending less time on your site, which tells search engines that you really aren’t providing the information or user experience that one needs, in which case your ranking will begin to lower. So fix those errors and broken links!
