When you think of Search Engine Optimization in Danville, what is the first thing that comes to mind? For most people, the answer to that is “keywords.” While keywords are a part of SEO, they are not the only part, and if you ONLY use keywords, you will not be pleased with your results.
Why?
Because keywords are actually a fairly small part of SEO when it comes right down to it. There are a variety of other things that need your attention in order to rank higher on search engine results.
The absolute most important factor to consider when attempting to increase your ranking in search engine results is content. If your site’s content is old and stale, there is no reason for visitors to return. Google understands this concept and has adjusted its algorithms to reflect this – sites with no fresh content get relegated to lower rankings.
This goes hand-in-hand with another factor, which is having a site that contains relevant links. Even if the link is to an internal page, make sure the link text is descriptive. A link should never say “click here” if your goal is search engine optimization. The keywords your linked article focuses on should appear in the link, if possible. This doubles the relevance of the link text and improves the rankings of both pages.
Metadata and alt tags work in the background to help improve your site’s relevance and ranking.
Metadata describes the content of your page. These are the tags inside your <head> tag area, labeled “keywords,” “description,” and “title.” The title sets what visitors see in the top status bar of their browser, and also what search engines use for the title of the page when it shows up in search results. The description should be a short synopsis of what the page contains, kept relatively short. Think of it as a tweet, if you will, and keep it about 140 characters. And, of course, the keywords meta tag will contain a list of the keywords that you expect people might use to find the page. Keep this to 6-8 phrases, for best results.
Alt tags are used with images and videos. Alt is short for alternative – this text is used by search engines and other text-only visitors, which cannot view the videos and images. Without alt text, those elements would be completely invisible to search engines.
Another factor to consider is load speed. Not only will visitors leave the site if it takes too long to load, search engines will rank a slow-loading site lower than one that loads quickly. The best ways to streamline your site’s load time are clean, concise code, optimized image sizes, fewer plugins, and minimal redirects. There are tools such as Google’s Webmaster Tools that can assist with search engine optimization for businesses in Danville. If you would rather trust your SEO to a company that has a lot of practice, give us a call!