For online business success, your website needs to be optimized for search engines. Strong SEO practices are key to ranking highly in web searches and finding exposure with new customers and clients.
Keep in mind that search engines are constantly altering the algorithms used to rank web pages. An important (and often overlooked) aspect of having an optimized website is continually adapting your website for new SEO practices.
Creating a fully optimized website is easier when you have a digital marketing agency like Borelli Designs working with you to create a highly ranking site. Here are a few easy steps you can take on your own or with an agency’s help to begin the optimization process.
SEO Keywords
Implementing SEO keywords into your website is a vital part of creating strong SEO, but you need to do some research before you get started. SEO keywords are the words or phrases you want your website associated with. You want to choose SEO keywords that your customers (and future customers) will be using when searching the web for your products or services. Do some brainstorming and market research to determine what words and phrases are appropriate for your business. For more information about SEO keywords, check out our recent blog post A Guide to Using SEO Keywords.
Page Titles and Descriptions
The page title and description are the text that appears in a web search. Ensuring that you have relevant titles and descriptions helps rank your web pages higher than your competition. Page titles and descriptions are a great place to integrate your SEO keywords. Your page titles should be relevant and give a short overview of the page content. Your description is a bit more extensive and can be a few sentences long. Try to summarize your page content succinctly while naturally incorporating your keyword or phrase.
Anchor Text
When using a hyperlink anywhere on your website, the word or phrase the link is attached to is called anchor text. Search engines favor web pages with internal and external links and pay specific attention to the words used as anchor text. Effective anchor text gives a short description of what you’re linking. Avoid using non-specific words as anchor text.
Image Text
Search engines are taking a look at more than your page content. They also look at text attached to all the images on your website. Primarily, search engines focus on alt text. Your alt text should be a short description of the image. If you can naturally introduce your keywords into this text, your SEO will benefit.
While we recommend using SEO keywords in all of the tips listed above, it’s important to use discretion when implementing keywords, as well. Stuffing your website with the same words or phrases will do more to hurt your SEO ranking than it will help.
