I recently went to a seminar on Search Engine Optimization. (SEO)
(For those a little less tech savy – Search Engine Optimization basically means things you can do to your website to help it rank higher on search engine results – like Google.)
This seminar was a good refresher on basic tactics that most people can implement on a regular basis on their own websites.
I thought I would share 4 of them with you to help you get a little boost in your search engine rankings. I won’t get into the full explanation as to the “why to do” but rather just give you the quick and dirty “what to dos”.
Before you start tactics to increase your rankings on Google you have to know what words or phrases you want to rank well for.
1) Choosing Your Keywords/Phrases
A good tool that can help you is the Google Adwords Planner. (yes, its free to use – you just need a gmail account)
You can enter in some keywords and see how many searches people have done on it/them and theres another tab that will give you alternate suggestions of words/phrases you could use as well.
2) H1 – “With great power comes great responsibility”
H1 (which is a HTML tag and stands for Heading 1) should be used wisely. There should be only 1 H1 on a page AND your heading tags should be
in order. So you should use them in order as in h1, h2, h3 and not skip in the order. So don’t go from H1 to h3 then h4 etc.
Surprisingly other than the h1 tags the rest of the h tags is less important – you could use 3 h2 tags on a page if you wanted.
3) Meta Description
If you use the plug in – SEO by Yoast then you have the ability to type in your own Meta description on posts. Now here’s the tip – The order matters. So use your most important keywords first and less important ones as you type.
4) Alt tags
If you upload images don’t forget to include alt tags. Alt tags are text descriptions of the image – because search engine algorithms can’t read an image file. They can only read the text that is included with it. Now don’t get crazy here – just stuffing keywords on every image – your alt tags should still be descriptive of what the actual image is.
Short and sweet for this weeks post. Be consistent in using the above four tactics on your website and help the search engines along a little when it comes time
to show the search results to your next potential customer.
Do you have a favourite SEO technique – please comment below.
another one
Thanks Ashley – I think we all want our websites to rank as high as they can, and armed with a few tips people can get there.
Good to get back to the basics Eric, can make a huge difference to your rankings.