The first post is on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Here are 8 things you can do right now to help your site along. The good news is most of the tips you will be able to do yourself, in-house.
Make a list of all the keywords that people may use to find your website when searching. Make sure you include the city where you are located and where most of your business comes from. Now make sure those words are peppered throughout your site where they are most relevant. Just use them in normal language terms – if you overuse these words, Google will consider them spam and this does not help your SEO.
Geek speak time! Meta Tags are HTML elements that are placed in the HTML Header that contain information about the page. The most important META tag is the META description and the one for your home page is particularly important. It is the brief description that appears in the search results. It’s short, so make it sharp, attractive and relevant to the page content. If you have a good Content Management System (CMS) then it will generally take the first paragraph of the page and make it the META description.
Internal links are links within the content of web pages. These are separate to your page navigation and are important to SEO ‘spiders’ (A spider is a program that search engines use. It constantly crawls around the web, reading content and assessing its relevance). To spiders, good internal links determine that your site content is relevant and well structured.
Experiment – Make some internal links on your website. If you are talking about a product or service on your home page, link the text to the page where there is more information. Talking about how to be contacted on your home page? Make a the text a link to your contact us page.
Alt Tags (Alternative Text Tags) are simply names assigned to images on your site explaining what they are about and how they relate to to you. If your website is built on a good CMS then you will have the ability to ad Alt Tags to your site images yourself. If not, you may need to go back to your developer. If you place your cursor over the image on the top of this post, you will see that I have named it accordingly.
Is your URL relevant to your business name and / or business type? No? Buy another URL and point it to your site. It really doesn’t hurt your SEO – in fact it helps. Make sure the URL is 3-5 words in length and has a .com or .com.au (Australia only) as an extension.
Set up your details on as many as you can find. They are generally high traffic websites, so links from their website to yours help SEO. Also – it’s another way that potential customers / clients can find you.
Here are three to get you started.
True Local, Yellow Pages, Local Business Guide
Join them and start communicating. There is so much web traffic going through these sites. Talk about your work and link back to your website. You might find that people will start talking about you and your product – The spiders love this. Get onto it and connect with us today!
Is your business registered on Google Maps? If not, do it now. It’s a great resource for people to find you based on your business type and location. For example – if you type in Branding and Brisbane – you will find us.
Check it here: Google Maps
If you would like to know more about SEO and keeping your SEO strategy relative to your business, feel free to give me a call.
*Post tags are the links in the ‘Related Topics’ below.
Author: Christine Bridge
