When properly done, search engine optimization (SEO) can take your business to the next level. With SEO, people looking for goods and services online can have a better chance of finding your site and becoming customers. If you already have a website, here are a few simple steps you can take to help your website rank higher in search engine results.
1. Take Care of Your SEO META Tags
At a minimum, you should update your SEO META tags for each page on your website. Some of these tags appear visible in search engine results while others are hidden and read by search engine “bots” on the back-end. If you use a content management system like WordPress or Wix, you can find settings for updating visible tags, like the page title and META description.
As an example, you could update your company’s home page title to read something similar to “Local Digital Marketing Services | Marketing Company” to help people find your site.
2. Double-check Your Site Load Speed
Good SEO is about more than what appears on the page. The whole experience can impact where and whether or not a search engine ranks your site. You can check your site’s mobile and desktop version speeds for Google and use the helpful metrics for boosting load times.
Your site load speed can be affected by things like your hosting company, individual image resolution and excessively bulky tracking scripts among others.
3. Optimize Your Images and ALT Text
Properly optimized images can help your site load faster. Image ALT text that’s relevant can also improve SEO performance. In a nutshell, you don’t want to upload images with large file sizes unless it’s absolutely necessary. Chances are, your images can be under 200kb in size if not smaller. You should be able to check the file size of your hosted images on the back-end of your content management system.
ALT text should be able to be adjusted in the image settings on the back-end, too. Use a few SEO-friendly words to describe what is in the image.
4. Audit and Update Irrelevant Content
Periodically, you may find it helpful to go through existing site content to make sure anything outdated or broken isn’t affecting your SEO performance. Links that no longer work can be removed or updated. Dates and times can be adjusted to keep content relevant.
You can also keep an evergreen mindset when creating content in the first place. Instead of using dates and times, use general language to minimize the amount of needed updating.
5. Use Internal Links and Try Out Backlinks
If you already have a page that is receiving a lot of traffic, you can add a few relevant internal links to the body content to boost lower-performing pages on your site. In theory, the visitors to the high-performing page may choose to click on one of these links.
Backlinks are also an important part of any SEO strategy. These are links from other sites pointing back to your content. You can get backlinks by writing guest articles for relevant outlets and including a link to your site within the content.
6. Repurpose or Optimize Old Content
Creating new content can be challenging and time-consuming, so you should try to make every piece count. In order to do this, you can repurpose or optimize old content. If you have an old blog post that’s still relevant, try reinventing it as an infographic.
You can also take pull quotes or testimonials from your site and share them on social media to try and drive organic traffic back to the pages you care about.
How Else Can You Improve Digital Marketing?
Search engine optimization can be a lot to take on. Luckily, there are professional digital marketing options that can save you time and give your site an SEO boost.
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