SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation. We hear about it way too often. Surprisingly, the importance and benefits of proper SEO practices always go unnoticed. SEO is essential because it helps Google’s algorithm understand your websites. Google then uses the information to rank them on search pages when relevant keywords are used in users’ search terms. In other words, the better your SEO, the higher you rank!
There are many ways to impact your SEO ranking. One of the most common practices is to publish content, especially on product pages and blogs. While content creation certainly plays an essential role in boosting SEO, you need to do more than writing content to stand out from all the other websites who are doing the exact same thing.
Optimise Images for SEO
Regardless of whether you’re selling a product or a service, images are great for enhancing your website’s aesthetics. While full resolution images and crystal sharp displays are very appealing, they also consume a lot of bandwidth. This translates into longer page loading time. Slow pages are bad for SEO and they usually result in high bounce rates. Google views this as negative web experiences.
The solution? Compress your images without compromising on its quality. There are abundance of free tools online that compresses images. There are also paid software for those who are concerned about privacy and compliance issues. Compressing an image may save you more than 10x the bandwidth required for your page to load!
Tell Me What’s Happening in the Picture
Sounds like something the invigilator from your PSLE oral examination said? Well, better put them oral skills to good use and start describing your images with alternative texts. Otherwise known as “alt text”, they are written copies describing images that appear when images fail to load on a website.
Alternate texts serve three main functions:
- Provide users on information of an image if it fails to load,
- Increase web accessibility, especially for visually impaired users and,
- Allow search engine crawlers to index webpages correctly for better search display.
Having a website with good web accessibility gives bonus to your SEO ranking. Alt texts are useful for guiding Google’s algorithm which possess limited abilities to identify visual elements to index your pages correctly and display them in relevant searches.
Structuring SEO Content with Proper Tags
With Google’s algorithm developing to become better at content analysis, header tags are no longer as crucial in SEO. Nevertheless, they remain useful in giving structure to webpages and allow search engines to better understand the content. When specific keywords are used with header tags, search engines can better identify the relevancy of your content with users’ search terms.
Using proper header structures benefit your website in three ways:
- Increase web accessibility and enhance user experience,
- Help search engines correctly analyse and index your page content for higher search terms relevance and,
- Appear as featured snippets when users search for specific search terms.
Header tags work the same way books are organised. H1 introduces the title of a blog post, H2 highlights to users and search engines the key points to look out for, and subsequent headers (if necessary) serve as sub-topics that supplement the key points.
Meta Descriptions for SEO
Meta descriptions are short paragraphs that display as search results and do not directly affect SEO ranking. However, they are useful for getting users to click into your website from search pages and can thus contribute to better page relevancy and indirectly, SEO ranking. Most webpages utilise meta descriptions. Depending on the CMS, meta descriptions may be auto generated instead of having to write one for every webpage.
The suggested length for meta description is about 150 characters, so a good practice would be to keep the texts short and direct. Do away with fluff texts and display key points that your audiences are keen to find out. Relevant and meaningful meta descriptions are useful in increasing clicks, and can indirectly benefit your SEO ranking.
Building Internet Street Cred with Backlinks
Backlinks are the internet equivalent of street cred because they are referrals from other sites to your website. They send signals to search engines that certain sites are credible and have valuable content.
You probably guessed it, this can have a positive impact on SEO ranking. While having many backlinks may be ideal, it is important to note that not all backlinks are beneficial for your site. Receiving backlinks from trusted and authoritative sites do more for your SEO ranking than from a dubious site. Trusted sites usually have high domain scores and rank higher according to Google’s algorithm.
Nonetheless, receiving backlinks from trusted sites are not easy to come by, especially if your site is fairly new and your content has yet to gain traction. One way to kick start your link building may be to consider influencers with credible domains and are keen to collaborate to direct traffic to your site.
SEO is long journey with great results that takes time to achieve, regardless of the scale of your business. SEO is also an experience unique to each business because no websites are identical. Some sites may have myriad of non-optimised pages while those who went digital recently may only need to tweak current processes to optimise their pages. Nonetheless, these five practices are great for businesses that are looking to kickstart SEO processes.
