Basic SEO to optimize your website
Business owners and decision makers spend a great deal of time creating strategies for reaching new customers and growing their businesses. They can implement paid online ads through Google, remarketing tactics to attract repeat site visitors, or they can promote new products and services on social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more.
A tactic that often gets overlooked, but should always be the first step in drafting or upgrading your digital marketing, is SEO (search engine optimization).
What is SEO?
SEO is the method used to make your website more visible in search engines. At its basic level, SEO describes the techniques used to ensure your website is the answer to someone’s online search.
What are the main components of SEO?
SEO is split into two main components — technical and content. Each component is vital to your site’s success. When your site isn’t ranking well, it’s generally because the site wasn’t built utilizing the fundamental SEO tools for each component.
What are the basics to technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the toolkit used on the backend of your website to improve your site’s searchability. Technical SEO’s focus is to make the site attractive to search engines by adding in code and instructions to tell them exactly what a web page contains and how the page answers a user’s search query. The basics consist of metadata, a sitemap, and code schema.
The top 3 things to consider when reviewing technical SEO
- Draft and Add Metadata to Every Page on the Site. Metadata is used to add descriptions to page titles, page descriptions, page headers, and on-page images to ensure a search engine is showing the exact description you would like your online users to view. Adding descriptions to image alt tags is often overlooked, but it has the ability to put your site on the first page of a Google Image Search.
- Create and Deploy a Sitemap. Sitemaps are designed to tell a search engine about all the pages on your website. This will aid in indexing your site and can be used to identify priority pages you would like the search engines to recognize.
- Add Schema Markups to Your Site. Schema is a coding format that can be used to help improve how your web page appears in a SERP (search engine results page) by enabling something called a rich snippet.
Search Engine Journal published an article about schema and rich snippets.
