Using SEO to Gain More Traffic to your Website
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. A user usually uses Google or Bing when looking things up on the internet. Google or Bing searches every page on the web and returns the results to you. The search engine uses an algorithm to determine what order you see the results. There are many aspects of SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes it’s just as simple as making sure your site is built so the search engine can understand it. If you own a website, search results matter. When your pages have higher rankings, more users will find your page. You want to make sure you take advantage of the algorithm that the search engine uses. This is the main principle of SEO, optimizing your webpage so they show up first in search results.
How Can You Optimize your Webpage?
The way we look at searches versus the way Google or Bing looks at searches is completely different. We have to remember that Google or Bing is just search keywords, tags, URL’s etc. and can’t see pictures and videos like we do. So, making sure you use the right text and tags is crucial to make your webpage crawl to the top of the search results.
Title Tags. This is one of the most important SEO factors. Before we begin with this you should know how to research keywords to make sure you know which ones are the most important ones to use for attracting the right type of potential customer. The title tag tells the search engine what the webpage is about. If a user searches keywords and you have those keywords in your title tag, your page will more likely show up closer to the top. When creating your title tag you want to make sure you keep your title pretty short and you should always include your brand name at the end.
Page Linking. When one webpage links to another, it is usually a recommendation telling readers that the site has good information. When a webpage has a lot of links coming to it, this looks good for a search engine. People will try to buy links to their webpage to make their page look more popular, but the search engine can usually detect this. When more trustworthy sites link your page, that has more effect on your SEO. If you have an online shoe store and a lot of different websites are linking the word shoe with your online company, the search engine will see that your page is significant. When someone searches “shoe” in google your page will more likely be seen. This process is considered link building. Link building is important because, like I said, links are a strong ranking factor in search engine’s algorithms. The more relevant links that connect to your webpage, the better your page does in search results.
Alt Text. Alt text or alternative text is used within an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. Since search engines can’t “see” pictures, using alt tags can help describe what the image is so the search engine can know what to show in search results. The best way to format alt text is keeping it short, but descriptive. If you have a picture of a stack on pancakes with blueberries, you could use the alt text “pancakes”. But a better descriptive alt text would be “stack of pancakes with blueberries on top”, this is more descriptive but still kept short.
Issues With SEO
Not everything in the world of marketing is perfect and SEO is no exception. Things like messy URL’s, broken hyperlinks, and poor mobile experience can all be issues. The most major issue, however, is duplicate content. Duplicate content is any content that is “appreciably similar or exactly the same as content that resides on your site”. When there is duplicate content, site owners can potentially suffer rankings and traffic losses. And right now, about 50% of the websites face duplicate content issues, which you can imagine has an impact on search results. Search engines try not to show more than one page with duplicate content in the search results, so they will try to rank the most authoritative version, according to Google. No one tries to purposely create duplicate content, but it is something you defiantly want to look out for when using SEO.