Behind the success of every great website lies a great SEO structure. Implementing good SEO practices and structure to your website is likened to having a great marriage, the more effort you put into it, the better it gets!
Listed below are 5 ways you can prep your website for SEO success:
1. Content
As you may know by now, content is king. Having well-written website pages filled with rich and engaging content is important to your audience. Another important aspect to having rich content on your site is making sure that you are always posting fresh content. Google and other search engines will crawl your site more often if you offer fresh and updated content. Also, make sure that your content contains relevant keywords and keyphrases to your website and your business.
2. Website Architecture
Create a search-engine crawl-friendly site by making sure that your website URLs are short and readable (ex: mysite.com/resources). Additionally, If you have a robots.txt file, make sure that there are no directives in the file that would block search engines from crawling your site. Finally, make sure that your website works well across all devices — not just for the desktop.
3. Headers
Make sure that your header tags (ex: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5) contain relevant keywords. For example, your H1 tag should contain a headline that tells the reader and the search engine what the page is about. Google’s algorithm gives a slight boost to those sites that use header tags. Even though HTML5 supports the idea that you can have more than one H1 element on each page of your website, it is still considered better practice to only have one H1 element per page (typically the title of the page).
4. Define your Images
It is important to add alt tags to each image you have on your site (ex: alt=”image description”). Not only does this make your website more handicap accessible, it’s also another attribute that Google and other search engines look for when indexing and ranking websites. Additionally, you will want to make sure that the file names to your photos are clear as to what the photo is (ex: red-balloons.jpg).
5. Keywords
Do your keyword research! Implement relevant keywords and keyphrases into your content and meta descriptions on your website pages. There are many keyword tools available that can help you with your research. They are simple to use too! You can simply plug the keywords in to the search tool and see how they rank and what your competition is. Google Adwords has a keyword planner tool that is free to use. Additionally, you can search for “free keyword tool” and a number of options come up.
Having relative keywords show up in your content is a great way to be found in searches!
Want to learn more? searchengineland.com has a great Infographic entitled “The Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors“.
