When marketing for your business, SEO is one of the most essential elements to finding success with your online audience. Spending a good amount of time and energy on optimizing your website to rank higher in search engines will enhance your products’ visibility to the digital world. This will ultimately make your business more accessible. As a small business owner, you may be wondering, “What are SEO best practices? How can I apply them to my marketing?” The SEO team at Art Unlimited is here to share some of our most helpful SEO tips to make it as simple as possible for you.
Go Meta
First things first, let’s talk meta. Meta tags take the page’s content one step further. They allow Google and other search engines to understand the page and index it easier. There are two essential parts of meta to focus on – meta titles and meta descriptions.
- Meta titles show up as the page, linked in blue on Google. These tell the main point of the linked page.
- Meta descriptions are the short paragraphs found beneath the blue titles. Their main purpose is to offer a brief snapshot of what the reader may expect if they visit the page.
Include this information for a great meta tag:
- Target keyword
- The location you’re targeting (if you’re marketing locally)
- Your company name
- A call-to-action (CTA)
Don’t Lose Your Head(er)
Next up are the headers. The use of headers for digital marketing purposes is important for many reasons. For instance, the main header (also called the H1) works as a title for the web page. Other headers (H2s and H3s) help break up the page content to make it easier to read.
To optimize your headers, make sure the main keyword for the page appears in the H1 and in one of the H2s. If you’re working on local SEO, you’ll also want to include the location in at least one of the headers.
Alt-Text for Accessibility
Alt-text tags on your images serve two purposes. They make your page be accessible for those who need visual help. They also help Google’s crawlers to scan them to determine the indexability of the page. We build out alt-text on our client sites to include the keyword and location they want to optimize for. Doing so allows Google to index the page easier, as well as receiving higher rankings in the SERPs.
Optimizing the King
On-page optimization is a key component of any successful SEO strategy. There are five important areas of a webpage to focus on when optimizing for search engines. Four areas were already mentioned: meta titles, meta descriptions, headers, and alt-texts. We can’t forget about content though!
You may have heard the saying “content is king.” Well, there is truth in this claim when it comes to SEO. Your content should have the keyword you want to rank for sprinkled throughout the page. This tells Google the page is relevant to the keyword topic. Thus, it is more likely to rank higher in search engines.
Be sure you avoid keyword stuffing and over-saturation! This is a black hat practice which sends up a red flag to Google’s algorithm. It can result in your site becoming blacklisted.
Google Resources
Use your resources! Google is a game-changer for SEOs because they offer so many useful tools. These tools can help nail down a winning strategy. The Google tools we find most helpful are:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google My Business
Each resource offers unique benefits. You can track metrics, fix site errors, enhance search engine visibility, and more.
Time to Get Technical
Getting a grasp on the basics of technical SEO will help you in maintaining your site’s health. This part of SEO is the trickiest to master. While you need coding knowledge, there are a few techy things you can pick up to optimize your website.
When it comes to codes, here are a few you could come across:
- 2XX – These codes are good. You want to be seeing them!
- 3XX – Redirection errors happen when a URL redirects to more than one resource and the search engine doesn’t know where to really send the user.
- 4XX – When a 4XX error pops up it is seen as a user error; usually the entered URL is incorrect. Because they are harmful it is important to pay close attention to them.
- 5XX – Known as server errors, 5XX codes mean your server cannot perform the requested action.
It’s important to know what technical errors can occur within your site. Then, you need to know how to avoid them so Google doesn’t penalize you. Here are some common errors you could find and how to avoid each one.
- Soft 404s – These usually mean the content on the page is too thin. Make sure the content on the page is well written with headers and images.
- Not Found 404s – These happen when a page has been taken down. It is best to redirect the removed URL to a similar page to avoid having a Not Found 404.
- Crawl Anomalies – A crawl anomaly generally happens when a page takes too long to load. There could also be a 400- or 500-level error. Since the search engine bots can’t crawl the page, they stop crawling your site. To fix this, you can run a Fetch as Google test in Google Search Console and then fix whatever errors it gives you.
The world of SEO can be a tricky place to navigate. If you’re still feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all, connect with us. We’ll collaborate with you to get your website on the right path for SEO success!