3 Quick Ways You Can Improve Search Engine Results

4 min readMay 27, 2015

Improve Search Engine Results

If you’re a business owner, you have to balance everything. If you’re just starting out, you’re probably doing everything by yourself. Even if you’ve been around a while, you still likely oversee everything personally. You have to maximize your efforts for the amount of time you spend on each task. If you’ve built your own website, or you paid to have it built but SEO services weren’t in the budget, you want to do what you can quickly to make the most impact. Let’s take a look at 3 quick ways you can improve your website’s search engine results.

Title Tags

The title tags of each page on your website are extremely important. It basically tells not only the browser, but the search engine indexing your site what the title of each page is. This determines how relevant your content is to the search engine. If Your website was an army, your title tags would be your generals.

Good On Page SEO

Title tags end up in the preview on search engines. It’s important to use primary and secondary keywords in your title tags to help search engines to understand what that page is about. It is an essential part of on-page-seo. On-page-seo is handling the seo of each page individually versus the site as a whole. One thing you should make a note of is that you shouldn’t cram too many keywords into your page title. Try to make your title as organic and natural sounding as possible.

It Shows Up Everywhere

Another reason why your title tags are important to every page is because they show up in social media shares and posts that way, too. For example, the title of your page becomes the text link preview that shows up when you link to a page from your site, or someone shares it to a social media site like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.

Meta Descriptions

If title tags are your generals, then meta descriptions are your commanding officers. They carry out most of the orders and objectives, describing the mission to soldiers. Your meta description should be natural speech, but should include keywords and related key phrases.

The Gist of Your Page

It’s important to describe the content on that page as accurately as possible. Meta descriptions aren’t for search engines as much as they are for people. The point of a meta description is to accurately describe the content that is covered on that page, so that search goers will be enticed to click on your site. It boils down to how relevant your page is to the topic they are interested in.

A Dash of SEM

You might say this is more search engine marketing, and it’s true, but it doesn’t matter how high you rank. If people aren’t clicking on your link, the ranking is worthless anyway. You might be surprised at how many more clicks you’ll get from making your meta description more enticing.

Take this advice with a grain of salt, though. Moz had this to say about meta descriptions:

“It can sometimes be wiser to let the engines extract the relevant text, themselves. The reason is simple: When engines pull, they always display the keywords and surrounding phrases that the user has searched for.” You can read more here.

Alt Tags

Alt tags are one of the most overlooked and forgotten elements in websites. Alt tags are the descriptive text that is put in the place of images when they are turned off. This is used a lot for accessibility and for disabled users, but is definitely beneficial to SEO. The purpose is to describe the images on your website to people who can’t see them. They are a great place to put related keywords, especially long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are more like phrases that don’t have as much competition on search engines. An example would be instead of targeting tablets, you would target iOS tablets, which is more specific.

Basically, a Quick Description

It’s a good idea to keep alt tags short and sweet, but you should describe the image in a way that ties it to the rest of that page’s content. Your images should be relevant to your subject, reinforcing the overall message anyway. For example, if you were selling apples, you wouldn’t have pictures of oranges and dinosaurs on that page. However, you might have an image of a basket of fresh apples. Your alt tag might read “a basket of fresh apples” which describes the image itself.

Conclusion

The 3 quick things can be applied to any website in very little time or effort, but can have a big impact on your results. A better title tag and alt tags directly affects rankings, while your meta description makes the result that shows up in search engine listings more enticing to click. This is a quick one-two combo that is sure to give you better results.

What do you think? Do you have any tips for quick ways to improve your search engine results?