Whenever you go on Google or Bing, you search for answers; you type in a series of questions or random words that you think will bring you the answer faster. As a business owner, you want to give your potential customers all the answers they are looking for…but they have to find you first.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website from these excellent search engines. SEO is an ongoing process that starts as soon as you add content to your site. With so many moving parts that go into SEO, there are a few basics that you can do all on your own!
Add A Page Description
You might not be ready to do all the keyword research necessary for your website, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t know your products or services by heart. Add a meta description to each of your pages so that when a customer searches, they can quickly notice that you have what they are looking for. If you let search engines crawl your site, it will generate a description for you, but more often than not, it is the first sentence on the page that might not have any of the vital information.
Alt Tags for Images
A big part of search engines that don’t get much appreciation is how a keyword search can bring up an image. When searching for jewelry, a dress, or even food, sometimes the visual is what customers need. When you add a name to all of the images on your website, you add more keywords and a different channel to be found in. Don’t make these names too long; up to three words are more than enough as long as you make sure that it is a clear description.
Submit Your Sitemap
This part sounds like you need to become a web developer overnight, but I promise you…you don’t. Every basic website platform will auto-generate a site map for you that outlines every page on your website so that search engines can crawl it easily. If you are unsure where to find it, just type in your URL, then add /sitemap.xml at the end, and something like this will appear:
On another tab, open Google Search Console, type in your website, and add the site map. Copy each URL that appears to help search engines acknowledge your pages as ready!
Link It Up
If you are on your “About Us” page and mention an amazing service or product that you offer, then make sure that the text is hyperlinked to that specific page. This encourages your users to engage more with your site without having to do all the heavy lifting. This is called internal links, and it shows search engines that the users want to read more about what you have to offer and causes you to rank higher in authority.
Get Your Name Out There
While you are networking with people in your industry, they can refer you on their website. Similar to internal links, this is called backlinking. Other sites are referring you to search engines to see you as a more trustworthy site. This will push you higher in search results. Suppose other sites are putting your name out there – then, so will the search engines!
In the end, SEO is all about the long game. I have learned that users who find your website organically tend to stay around the longest because of that feeling that they have made a discovery all by themselves. It helps in creating a loyal customer that is sure to refer others. And that’s the Bottom Line!