Optimizing your website for search is an integral part of building a profitable online business. While not every visitor to your site is a searcher, having a well-optimized site that gets found and returned can boost your ROI in the long run.
SEO should be done on a regular basis to stay up to date and increase rankings. However, most people fail to because they are unfamiliar with the process and/or don’t have adequate resources at their disposal.
This article will go over some key tips that can help you optimize your website for search. These tips can be done on the fly, so no need to wait for morning or afternoon coffee to start working on it.
Create image alt tags
Only a small percentage of image searches will return nothing but images. By adding an alt tag to your images, you can give yourself some breathing room when it comes to displaying your text and link information.
An alt tag is a special type of tag that displays additional text or data in place of the standard text field. This extra information can be new content, an emphasis message, or even a link to another piece of information.
By creating an alt tag for your pages, you can gain some extra search traffic and savings on Google and other search engines. This may not be a worth the effort if your site does not have much missing text or is relatively minor content.
Alt tags are also helpful when looking for a general term. When searching for topics like “dog” or “functions”, only include the non-specific words so the search engine gives you more help.
Create a robots.txt file
If you have no web server installed, then you should create a directory called “robot” and install a web server. Most people use Apache or IIS, but you can do either or all.
Robots.txt is an entry field for your website that specifies what websites can access your site. Many search engines specifically refer to these files to specify how your site works and what it wants to say.
For example, if a site specified that it was a publication that published nothing but links, then creating a robots.txt file would specify that no link should go to my website because my content looks bad in an indexation (google).
Therefore, if you are running a blog where your content is important, then creating a robots.txt file would specify what websites can access your site and declare how they want to talk to people.
Set up your redirects
Once your site is optimized for search, you can start setting up your redirects. This refers to the process of sending visitors to another site or domain that they could view as identical to your site but with a different URL.
Setting up redirects can be tricky, so it is always best to do this via a free service. Most web hosting companies offer free set up tools, so don’t worry about having to set up all of your permanent links.
Many times, linking back and forth is necessary for businesses to draw sufficient traffic and interest from their target audience. By having at least one link back people will know what they should do if they want to see what you have to say.
Optimize your content
Once your site is optimized for search, you can start adding more sites to your domain. Adding a new site to your domain will increase the number of hosts that recognize it.
This is important as only a few host have working relationships with Google, so adding another site to your domain is critical to increasing rankings.
Using duckduckgo is an easy way to add another domain to your website. You can even set up an account at duckduckgo and set up a link to your new site!
To keep domains from registering with different numbers on different services, you can use web hosting companies like GoDaddy or Cybernetics which give you a single email address for all of your domains.
Use keywords in your titles
Titles are very important! Using a short, concise title that sums up your site’s purpose will help some search engines and Serpophiles find your site.
To use a more advanced term, titles can be content-based keywords. By placing my website’s title keyword rich in my site’s title, search engines can place the site in their index and use it in searches.
Use keywords in your headers
Using keywords in your header is an easy way to optimize your site for search engines. All you have to do is put the keyword you are looking for in your header, and then add the site that you are linking to them from.
Then, when people search on those keywords, your site will show up! This can be helpful when promoting your site as a place to find products and services.
Optimize your links
Once your site is indexed by a search engine, you can start adding links to your site. Adding links to your site is an important part of operating a web page for people to find and access.
Many web page designers include a link to their site in the submission process. You can also add extra links to your sites by clicking the link next to the address of your website.
Many websites have very poor quality links, so be careful. A well-connected website can become vulnerable when it adds an illegal or spammy link!
It is very important to create good, quality links on your website so that people who navigate my site to yours can easily find you.
Set up a Google Analytics account
Having an account with Google Analytics will help you see how your site is being visited and how your posts and pages are being utilized on the site. This will help you optimize your site for search engines in the future!
You can also use their tools to track traffic to your site. You can purchase traffic data from sites like Moz, Quantcast, or Bing web analytics. These companies are very reliable!
These tracking tools will also help you determine how much content your users are searching for on your site.