So you’ve got your company website up and running. No matter how good looking your site may be, it’s useless without an audience. Making sure your company is a top contender in search engine results is the easiest way to attract new viewers to your website. Here are some simple tips for making sure your website stands a chance in the competitive playing field of search engine results.
1) Short but effective titles – Results are often ranked by the words shown in the title tag. A good title should contain your item of interest, followed by your website or business name. The title should be no more than 10 words.
2) Keyword selection – The most successful keywords are two to four word phrases that people might actually type into a search engine. When writing your content, include keywords throughout the entire content.
3) Detailed description tags – Meta description tags will help your website’s SEO, assuming you use them properly. Embed a short overview of your business in the meta keyword section of your code.
4) Fresh content – Search engines don’t like websites that aren’t updated frequently. Keep your content up to date and interesting.
5) Search Engine Friendly URLs – Your web address needs to be as reader-friendly as possible, but it should also communicate the name of your brand. Making sure the keywords in your web address match up with frequent searches related to your field will also help your site gain visibility and rankings. Your URL should also be short. The shorter, the better.
6) F-shaped format – A test was done on how people read/scan web pages. The results showed an “F” shape from left to right. Consider this when you are designing and writing for your website.
7) ALT text on images – By tagging alternate text on your images, the pictures used on your site will be more likely to come up in search engine results.
8) Link to others and attract backlinks – Don’t pay for backlinks; get them by producing good content that people will like to share. You can even ask others out there to link to you. It also is good to link to others. This will help others link back to you, plus it helps give search engines insight into what aspects of your site carry more weight than other less-linked areas.
9) Website performance – Search engines don’t like websites that take forever to load. Don’t bog down your website with huge graphics and videos. Make it unique, but quickly loadable.
10) What hurts SEO? It’s important to know what habits can damage your site’s visibility. First off, don’t use link services; these can ruin your reputation. Don’t stuff your page. Your content needs to be valuable and interesting to the visitors who see it. On the other hand, don’t have boring or empty pages.
Check out SEO services and process at MediaFuel.