Websites are only as good as their search engine ranking. The lower the rank, the less your site will get visited. And the fewer visitors, the less business you gain. Instead of wasting your money on a website that sinks to the bottom, implement these top five ways to optimize your website.
1. Have a unique and keyword-friendly title tag for each page of your website. This is huge – search engines tend to put more weight on title tags, since they’re the first clue to what your website is all about (both to web crawlers and your viewers). Placing a unique title tag on each page shows that each page is valuable enough to stand on its own.
2. Be smart with headlines. Search engines have a top-down approach to websites. Meaning, the headline will be the next thing these crawlers check out. Make your page headlines speak to your business as a whole. For example: “St. Paul Plumbing Service.” If you’re attached to a catchy phrase, use it for the h2 (the subheading).
3. Utilize description meta tags. Even though meta tags don’t show up on the visible website, these are almost as valuable as the title tags. For these tags, use more specific keywords and phrases to showcase your website, rather than general concepts.
4. Utilize image ALT tags. These tags appear in the HTML code, right after graphic address or URL. What image ALT tags do is help optimize the graphics and images on your website. Search engine crawlers cannot “see” images, so these tags are a way to get the crawlers to understand the image in a written form.
5. Keep your content valuable and unique. When search engines “crawl” your website, they look for unique content and keywords. It’s still debated how many keywords per page are ideal – 2-3 keywords/page is a good estimate. It’s important to not overload your text with keywords, because the crawlers process this as spam and will not rank your website well.
There are plenty of other website optimization tactics – many of which occur within the website coding. At VEM Global™, we can help optimize your website, from the coding to the content to the link structure.
