Is your website optimized for search engines? In today's world you have to optimize for Google, Bing and other search engines to ensure your website is reaching your intended audiences.
Maintain high quality content above all
Implement proper alt text and HTML markup
Understand Google's ranking system
"Perhaps one of the most important ways [to improve SEO], is just generally having high quality content that's relevant to your users. Meaning that throughout all of your pages, you're including the right terms and keywords that your audience is searching for."
Hello and welcome to our S&E Quick Tips video series, where we share helpful industry tips for you to use and incorporate into your next project.
Today’s topic is about: Optimizing your site for Search Engines
- We all know how important it is to show up well in search results. So in today’s world, you have to optimize for Google, Bing and other search engines to come and spider or index your site. So you need to do some things to ensure that you’re not deterring the search engines to rank your site.
- Things that are really important to Google includes if your site is secure (so it needs to use HTTPS instead of just HTTP, which signifies a secure site). Back in the day, you only needed to use HTTPS when you were perhaps collecting credit card information, but not anymore—Google is really looking for all sites to use HTTPS to keep the web safe.
- It’s also very important to have a responsive site, Google evaluates if your site is mobile friendly and factures that into increasing or decreasing your relevance in search results. Your site can be penalized this way if it is not responsive.
- Also fast loading time—Google always takes page speed into account for search result rankings.
- And accessibility is another very important factor. There are guidelines to follow to make sure your site is designed and developed so that all people, regardless of disabilities or impairments can easily access your site. And this is another way to improve your search engine optimization.
- A few SEO tips we always pass on includes: Using alt text on all of your images is important, using search engine friendly URLs, and just really have the proper HTML markups in place. So on every page, be sure you’re properly using the H1 header tag as your page title, and that page title should use terms that people are going to be searching for. You can also use things like structured data—there are ways of putting structured data on your site that assists Google in finding important data on your pages. Perhaps one of the most important things is having high quality content that’s relevant to your visitors, meaning that throughout your pages, you’re including the right terms and keywords that your audience is searching for.
That wraps up our quick tips for today, stay tuned for more and let us know if there’s a topic you’d like us to cover next!