Like any website owner, getting your content in the hands of as many people as possible is important to growing your brand. Whether you’re a news site or a local business trying to sell a product or service, a solid online presence is important to increasing your exposure and income.
It’s easy to get discouraged when a site is ranked so low that it would never turn up in a normal web search, but there are ways to address this. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a rapidly growing field focused around optimizing web pages for services like google. Good SEO is crucial if you want your site to be more visible, and this article is focused around some basic tips for improving your On-Page SEO.
Provide Quality Relevant Content
When people were first discovering the idea of SEO, they would stuff specific keywords into their article at every possible opportunity so that Google ranked them favorably when said keywords were searched. Today, keyword stuffing has the opposite effect. If you sacrifice the quality of your content to litter your site with keywords, Google has the algorithms to recognize this and will penalize your ranking accordingly.
Google wants to show users content that is relevant to their searches, but it also has to be useful. A page with nothing to offer but a mess of “SEO Keywords” isn’t useful, so it won’t be shown as the most relevant result. Take the time to develop a quality page. There’s no shortcuts around this in 2017.
Update Content Regularly
To add to the first section, it’s important that you’re active on your site. Building a great website and then letting it sit for months or years at a time with no updates will lead to lower search rankings. Even if it’s a small change, strive to be active on your page to maximize SEO
Use Unique Titles
The internet is gigantic, and the chances that you have completely unique content that hasn’t already been done at least a few places are incredibly slim. To set your page out from the pack, go with a catchy title that differentiates your page from competitors. Different phrasing often isn’t good enough. Find a way to make your title unique and relevant to related but different search terms so your page is as visible as possible.
Always Tag Your Images
Make sure you fill in the “alt attributes” section of each image or other media you upload to your site. By describing your picture with relevant keywords, Google will be able to more easily tell if your images are relevant and then show your page in search results.
We hope these tips have been informational and helpful. Apply these guidelines to your site today and you’ll likely see your rankings continue to climb.