Must Know SEO Tips For Any Business Website

‍What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is simply put how your website communicates with the search engines, this is how Google, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines know what’s on your website. To bring native search traffic onto your website you need to understand the basics of SEO and how to best make it work for your website.

Keywords

Keywords are the easiest way for a search engine to recognize what type of content and information is on your website. You want to make sure to identify specific keywords and phrases that are going to be included in what your visitors are looking for. For example, let’s say your customers are going to be looking for a electric toothbrush subscription, you want to make sure that in your website your product is described well, and include terms that would help bring up your website for when someone’s looking to improve their oral health with a subscription based electric toothbrush.

Metadata

Think about meta data as the cover of a book, it’s the first thing that is shown in a search result and it’s the first thing that that search engine sees when scanning your website for information. There are different types of metadata, titles, descriptions, keyword phrases.

breakdown of how websites are showcased on search results, showing the Page Title, Keywords, and Page Description

Titles

This is the title of your page, and the first thing displayed when in a search result, make sure this is correct and enticing enough to grab the attention and bring new traffic to your website.

Descriptions

This also shows up in a search result, it’s the information under the title that clearly states what information is on the page. This of this as a quick synopsis of the content on the page. This should be a quick one to two full sentences to be a good description. This helps with SEO because it lets traffic know what’s on the page, but this isn’t always going to be the result, sometime search engines highlight specific information on the website that will better showcase the search needs of that user.

Keyword Phrases

Clear key phrases that showcase the content, product, or service on a page are a good idea to include. Bringing key terms helps with highlighting the content your page is about. You don’t want to overload your page with every possible keyword, but it’s a good idea to have a shortlist of key points you want to make sure the search engine remembers about your webpage when providing results.

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Search engines highlight keywords that match search phrase for users

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Image & Video

Rich media has been growing in popularity, digital images, and online videos are a great way to bring attention and attract viewers into your website and brand. It’s also good practice to include ALT TEXT into your images, which helps with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) by assisting users with a visual disability hear what the image is about. These visual mediums are also a great way to make content a lot more visually pleasing to look at.

Videos are easier than ever to create, whether it’s filmed on a mobile device or a professional camera, a great story through video is a great way to increase duration on your site. With platforms like YouTube, you are always able to bring traffic from search onto your website with special offers or links to additional material. Videos are also a top result in many google searches, and when optimized with care you can get your video up onto of search results, even above website links.

screen capture of a google search "how to tie a tie" with a video being the number one result and additional videos being served before any website links.

Online Reputation with Backlinks

You may be thinking what is a backlink? A backlink is simply a link to your website page from another website. These external links signal to Google that another site finds your content useful and valuable enough to include a link back to the site. There are different types of backlinks, and the value provided by them are different depending on what type they are.

Domains with higher authority online offer a more valuable link than ones that are spammy or low-quality. Spammy websites can hurt you when search engines look for sources of external links back onto your website, make sure to not sign up or register pages for these types of services. Link relevancy is also a factor, Google does a great job at understanding how relevant your website is vs. the website that’s linking your content, it’s a factor that comes into play when the search engine looks at backlinks.

The location and quantity of the link is also a factor, with links in proper places instead of being pushed away into the footer of the page are typically irrelevant or low-quality links. With hundreds of links on a page, your link is also devalued because there’s so much more to choose from rather than specifically going into detail about why you page would be useful for the users on other sites.

SITE A includes a link in their blog about bikkes to your website that sells replacement gears. Your site receives traffic from "Site A" that is quality and reliable. Providing a quality backlinks from Site A to Your Website

Alt Tags

Alt Tags, these are hidden gems when it comes to SEO. Alt Tags were created as a way for images becoming more accessible on the web. When individuals with a. visual disability can’t see the content on the website screen readers and tools that help read content on the web, these Alt texts are a great way to explain the images on pages. Alt Tags are also a gem when it comes to website crawlers when exploring the content on millions of pages, since search engines aren’t people, it’s harder to tell what’s in an image without any details, so using the data from Alt Tags allowing to help better understand the content on your page.

Good Alt Tags are descriptive tags, a few words minimum, enough to describe the images that you’re tagging.