SEO, or search engine optimization, is important for your business or organization and – if done right – will help your website get more visibility and credibility. It can seem daunting if you are just getting starting to develop your web presence. I was definitely in the camp of putting off learning about SEO. I knew it was relevant for my website and business and I knew it was necessary to do. Plus there a lot of people, at least on social media, continuously talk about how important it is and why I should pay them money to help my website rank higher on Google. What I learned was that, it’s really not that serious. I mean it is, but it isn’t. All it comes down to is ensuring that your website has relevant, well-written content centered for your audience and this will help your people find you.
To make it less intimidating, here are 6 basic tips to help you get started with SEO for your site:
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Make sure your content is interesting, useful, and well-written.
- Write unique content for your audience, put them first. Pretend you are your dream client and write your content for that person.
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Avoid distracting ads.
- I don’t think I need to elaborate. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you do, if your page makes it hard to look around because of ads, I’m leaving.
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Links are, like, important.
- Whether you are linking to relevant sources, or your website is linked elsewhere, your links have to at least be descriptive and have a appropriate and relevant anchor text.
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You can influence how Google Search sees you.
- If you are on Squarespace or Wix, take advantage of filling in all the fields for your
<title>and site description. Don’t skip these steps just because they seem tedious. Speaking of skipping steps…
- If you are on Squarespace or Wix, take advantage of filling in all the fields for your
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Write good alt text for your images and videos.
- Not only is alt text great for accessibility reasons, it helps your SEO! Like with your content and links, you have to make sure that your images are relevant and of high-quality. Imagine being an artist and the alt text for one of your artwork images just says “Art”. Help Google help you by writing relevant and sharp alt text.
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Organize your information in ways that make sense.
- Organize your pages into folders or groups that are topically similar. For example, if you are a daycare you would want your registration forms in a section focused on Enrollment and not in the “About us” or “Gallery” section.
Once you get the basics down, you can continue to maintain your SEO strategy by providing Google with a sitemap or enhancing structured data. Hopefully this quick little overview makes it a little easier to start optimizing your website and start getting more hits — through Google at least.