SEO is the backbone of your company’s marketing infrastructure and you’ve heard it time and time again. Especially today, “as consumers seek information about how businesses are handling COVID-19 restrictions, evaluate their buying options, adapt to remote work, and try their very best to stay informed and entertained,” (Search Engine Watch) optimizing your content for search is more important than ever. SEO can make or break your success, and it doesn’t need to be difficult. Check out these five simple tips to improve your site’s SEO strategy today!
1: Write for Humans
It’s easy to get carried away with keywords when you’re writing blogs and social posts, but it’s important to prevent your work from becoming too robot-esque. Keywords are crucial for your search engine rank but, above all, sounding human is paramount. This is especially true today, as search terms evolve towards a pattern that more closely resembles human speech.
Here is an example of what not to do, courtesy of WordStream:
“Are you looking for cheap running shoes? If you’re looking for cheap running shoes, look no further. Our cheap running shoes website is the best place to order your new cheap running shoes. Feel free to check out our selection of cheap running shoes from our cheap running shoes selection below.”
Obviously, this paragraph is a bit ridiculous. Keywords must be used in moderation. Try following a natural pattern of speech to write, and you’ll end up with something more like this:
“Are you looking for cheap running shoes? Look no further! Our website is the best place to order your new running shoes. You’re sure to find the perfect pair when you check out our affordable selection of running shoes below.”
With this in mind, it’s also a good idea to write for a variety of higher and lower volume keywords. This will assist in reaching the desired audience at multiple steps along their journey to turn leads into customers.
2: Optimize your Images
Adding images to spice up your website content helps engage your visitors and spark interest for people scanning your content. However, they can slow down your page loading times which, in turn, harms your SEO performance. Be sure to compress any very large images to improve your load times, and test the site yourself to ensure there are no hitches to the load time.
Also, use the images on your site as a keyword opportunity. Adding alt-text to images is a subtle way to incorporate more of your best keywords into your site. Alt-text is used within HTML code to add descriptive text to an image. This allows for more keywords and better descriptions to be made available to search engine crawlers, which assists them in properly indexing an image.
3: Use Readable URLs
Use sensible and readable URLs for all of your subpages and blog posts. If users cannot read your URL, then neither can the search engines. Try limiting your URLs to 3-5 words, so as not to overcomplicate them. Not only will this directly influence your search engine ranking, but it will make readers more inclined to share your blog pages.
4: Use Meaningful Page Titles and Meta-Descriptions
Unoriginal page titles can lead to your site getting lost under pages and pages of similar content. Differentiate your title to stand out to your audience among millions of search results. The same holds true for the meta-description. The meta-description is the snippet of your site that appears below the header on search results that briefly summarizes the contents of the page. It is common to make the mistake of leaving your meta-description as the default. Putting time and thought into your meta-description allows for maximum keyword inclusion. It also allows you to draw readers in with an enticing snippet of what more is to come within your page.
5: Incorporate Links
Build your page authority by incorporating links both to other pages within your site and from external sites. Linking from other sites is crucial to building your site’s domain authority. Build a plan to network with relevant websites that have higher page authority than you do in order to incorporate quality backlinks. Having backlinks in other sites alerts Google that your site is more reputable and boosts your overall performance.
If you have questions for the SEO experts at DSG, we encourage you to scroll down and use the form fill at the bottom of the page. We look forward to hearing from you!
