3 super SEO tips you cannot ignore
SEO is your website’s self-promotion superhero, allowing you to find the right audience with little investment requirements apart from some time and know-how. To maximise your ROI, check out these 3 tips to get started with SEO.
With approximately 3.5 billion searches on Google every day, there’s an ever-increasing need for websites to be consistently optimised in order to meet the rules that are infused into search engine algorithms. This means that when it comes to Search engines determining what page results to show, and when to show them, there are thousands of factors at play. But never fear! We’re here to help you focus on the diamonds in the rough factors that influence how your website pages are ranked in the eyes of search engines.
Before we get started on the tips, take a minute to pause and reflect on the value of knowing who you want to attract to your page. Let’s start by getting meta about the whole search process. How do you use search engines? What are your habits? What links do you click? When the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) are presented, have you ever scrolled and clicked through to page 10? (Did you know there was a page 11?!) Of course, understanding and being aware of this behaviour goes a long way towards understanding the significance of a search audience and the results they may receive.
If you’re someone who would go to page 10, then you are a unicorn! Research shows that sites ranked on the first page of search results receive 95% of all organic traffic. Now thinking about your site, how does it rank compared to its competitors? How much organic traffic do you see on your website daily, weekly, monthly, yearly? Do you want to increase that traffic? Search algorithms are continually updating to provide better outcomes for searchers, so it’s vital that you monitor and adapt content to ensure you remain relevant.
Search engines monitor the relevance, purpose, and usability through a variety of different features and factors. Rather than wasting your time listing ALL factors, I’m going to give you the hot tips (3 to be exact) which can and should be implemented into any website.
Meta Descriptions
While meta descriptions aren’t directly influencing the rank of a site, it is the starting point to content promotion and is shown to improve click-through rates. The power of using meta descriptions is in its ability to attract an audience through keywords in addition to providing an overview of the webpage’s purpose. Furthermore, Google bolds keywords in search results, including content within meta descriptions. This, in turn, helps pages stand out by ensuring the information served is scannable and easy to comprehend. By optimising this element you’re effectively creating a guide for our often multitasking minds to scan the relevant info and make click decisions quickly.
Optimising Images
There’s a reason why Maverick said, “I FEEL THE NEED, THE NEED FOR SPEED!” Studies show 47% of users expected a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less and your quickest win for speeding up your website is by optimising images. We can’t stress enough the value of optimising your content. As accessibility to, and the speed of, internet and data continues to increase it’s likely that consumer expectations will continue to rise. Additionally, page speed is also a highly valued ranking factor used by Google, but we do want to caution it isn’t the be all and end all. It’s just one of the thousands of important factors that go into determining a website’s SERP position.
Just like your 4th grade teacher, search engines recognise bad behaviour — most notably bad user experiences — by measuring bounce rates; this then impacts your search ranking, often leading to a poorer or deeper search ranking position. This has a significant impact for websites as a 2018 Google algorithm update meant the search engine now held the websites directly accountable for their page speed. A key method used to boost page speeds is image compression. Free programs to assist you in compressing images includes Optimizilla and Compress JPEG.
Want to optimised your knowledge of improving page speeds? Check out this non-developer’s guide to improving page speed, created by our very own Full Stack Web Developer Alex!
Alt Text
If Stevie Wonder just called on your website to find out more about the service you provided, would he be able to create a sense of it with his mind’s eye? Alt text or alternative attributes of an image tag, acts as a modifier providing descriptive information about an image within the HTML code of a page. The purpose of Alt Text is to assist visually impaired site visitors and search engine crawlers when they are navigating the site. Here is what the alt text of an image will look like:
When looking at the below gif, how would you describe it? Search engine crawlers may be able to distinguish that this is a gif of a bunch of people jumping. Which isn’t necessarily correct, however, with the help of alt text we can tell the crawlers that in fact this is a gif of “The entire Orange Digital family happily jumping at the back of the Fortitude Valley office.”
While the Orange team will often leave Alt Text tags until the final stages of a client’s website optmisation project, I wanted to ensure this Website Optimisation Unsung Hero had some time to shine. What Alt Text tags lacks in implementation speed (it’s very time consuming to create) and high value ranking factors, it makes up by improving and optimising the User Experience. Imagine the power of your site being the only one in your field that catered for all levels of user accessibility requirements! As a bonus, if you can get into the habit or creating Alt Text tags NOW for every new image you upload, you’re not only improving the accessibility of your site, but possibly future proofing for any algorithm changes that do push this element up the SERP rankings.
So, now you have some hot tips to get started optimizing your website, what are you going to implement first?
Let us know by dropping us a line or send us your thoughts, feedback and questions on SEO or any other digital topic. We’d love to invite you in for breakfast and coffee sometime soon!
Originally published at https://www.orangedigital.com.au on August 28, 2019.
