In our prior post, we reviewed the top 3 changes you can make on your site to give it a better visual appeal. Today the focus will be on search engine optimization (SEO) which is the ranking given to your site when Internet users search with keywords. Yes, having a beautiful site is great and important but if nobody can find the site online, you are missing on potential revenue.

=1= Optimize your copy:

If you have not read your own site in over 3 months, it is time to spend a couple of hours and review its copy. Go through each individual page. There is always place for improvement. Sometimes just editing a few words can make the content more compelling and powerful. Try to engage your audience in your textual content, make it interesting. Use keywords and keyword combinations within your text making sure the keywords are used in full sentences, not listed in bullet points (that would be keyword stuffing).

Add content. There is always an opportunity for more pages. Think of article that you might be able to write showing your expertise level. Make a page for each article. If you have a blog, blog! Add paragraphs to pages that appear short or unfinished. If writing is not your thing, hire an expert who understand the fine balance between writing for humans and search engines.

We have been repeating ourselves for the past 10 years… Content is king on Google!

=2= Optimize images:

Optimizing images for search engines is very easy. There are 4 elements to remember:

1. Name your image a relevant keyword name prior to uploading it. Make sure that your admin system does not strip the name and completely replace it with a random number. Example: dentist.jpg is much better than 123456.jpg if you are a dentist.
2. Add as alt tag for each image that are not background images in CSS (those cannot have alt tags). Alt tags are hidden from your visitors but very important to the search engines. It is also important for visually impaired Internet users as often times their vision assistance software will read the alt tag to them if they cannot discern what the photo is.
3. Add a title tag which is the mouseover tag visitors can see if they place their cursor over the image. The truth is most people won’t notice it but nonetheless Google, Bing, and other SE will take notice of it.
4. Size your images as you want it to appear. Do not upload on a page a billboard size photo and give it code to resize it to a smaller version. Google does not like to do that and you may be penalize for it. Also it will slow down the download of the page.

=3= Optimize the code:

Having up-to-date code for your website is very important to search engines. When your site is perfectly coded, it gains bonus points in ranking. Of course it needs to be fully responsive to mobile devices. If it is not, it will be heavily penalized, meaning the SE will lower its ranking.

In addition there are many coding techniques that can take your website’ SEO to the top level for ranking. Make sure to discuss with your web designer, if he or she is familiar with such techniques.

To check your website’s code, go to W3C Validation.

To check your website’s responsiveness, go to Mobile-Friendly Test.

Easy 3 steps… Optimize content, images, and code. The coding part is more challenging as you will need to hire a professional web programmer. If you have questions or would like to schedule an in-depth conversation, call us in California at 707-794-9999.