The first step to a successful SEO campaign is to make sure the search engines can easily analyze your site. Search engines like Google have to determine what your site is about and if it deserves rankings in their search results. We are a national SEO company and are experienced in optimizing websites. Here are a few optimization tasks that will help you.
Keyword Research
The first step to optimizing your website is to determine what keywords and phrases you would like to rank for. Keyword research includes analyzing relevant keyword phrases your potential clients may use to search for your product or service.
Use keyword research tools like Google and SemRush to discover popular and high-value keywords. Once the relevant keywords are chosen, they will be useful as you develop your content strategy.
On-Page Optimization
Here are a few of the most important on-page optimization that can help your website’s SEO ranking:
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Search engines like Google will display search results for their users. The search results in the organic section will display your URL, Title, and Description to help users find the services and businesses they are looking for.
The title tag and description need to be informative yet entice users to click on your listing. The higher the click-through rate (CTR), the higher in search results your company will appear. Google sees your site as relevant because users are clicking.
If you don’t set a title tag and meta description, Google will set one for you. They try to determine the best content, but more often than not, it isn’t. You should carefully craft an informative title and description while using the keywords you want to rank for.
Because the title tag and meta description is backend code on your website, and many users do not understand how to code, there are tools you can use. Yoast is a popular WordPress plugin that makes it easy for you to add and customize title tags and meta descriptions. Some CMS tools include it in their software.
Heading Tags
By structuring your content with headings, it helps your potential clients understand what the content is about. It also helps search engines understand your content structure as well.
There is a hierarchy of Heading tags, starting with H1 and going to H6. There should only be one H1 tag, as that tells your readers what the page is about. This should be informative but also include one of your researched keyword phrases.
Under your H1 heading, you can further break up your content into H2 headers, and under that, H3, and so forth. A good rule of thumb is the more user-friendly your content is, the more search engines will reward you with better rankings.
Keyword Placement
If someone is looking for ‘plumbing services’ and you don’t include the keyword phrase in your content, search engines won’t see your site as relevant to that keyword. Keywords should be added naturally throughout the content and not overly used. The keyword shouldn’t be used more than once for every 300 words of content.
Image Optimization
Search engines will try and determine what an image is by the content placed around it, but isn’t very accurate. By adding alt text tags to the image, search engines can then easily identify what the image is. It won’t help your organic rankings, but it will help rank your images in an image search result.
Helpful Content
Google released the helpful content update in December 2022. Content that is useful, informative, and helpful is being rewarded by Google. The update is designed to devalue and filter out spammy content from its search results. Use programs like Grammarly to help edit your content for readability.
Internal Link Building
Google uses a grading system to assign value to web pages. These pages can send a portion of their value to other pages through linking. A good internal link structure can help Google know which pages are the most important.
Page Speed Optimization
In recent years, page speed has become a ranking factor for search engines. They don’t want a bad experience for their users with sites that take a long time to load. Google has a tool to help you evaluate your page speed with tips on how to improve. Using a Content Delivery Network(CDN) will help make your page load faster. Cloudflare is popular, and it has a free version of its software.
Mobile-Friendly Website Designs
With the widespread adoption of mobile smartphones, more people are using mobile to search for information. Because the screen size is very small, a traditional website will not look as well as it does on a desktop.
Using a responsive website will help. If you don’t, there are many tools available to help give your users a better experience on their mobile phones. For WordPress, the use of the AMP plugin will help.
Optimize With Our National SEO Company
At UpFire SEO, we can help optimize your website to reach a national and local target audience. By using relevant keywords, on-page optimization, high-quality content, link building, and other website optimization techniques, we will work with you to have your website rank higher on search engines. Contact our team today to learn more about optimizing your website.
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