Five SEO Essentials
It seems like everyone is offering SEO services these days and it's causing all sorts of confusion among business owners. What are these people actually offering? Will they be able to boost my search engine ranking?
When paying an SEO provider or web designer to boost your SEO, ask them to list the actions they will be taking. If they include all five of the following, you can be sure your SEO will be boosted:
1. KEYWORDS, KEYWORDS, KEYWORDS
When someone is searching for something you offer, there will be common keywords used. Ensuring your website has as many relevant industry keywords as possible is very important. Your SEO provider should be asking you for a list of keywords that your customers will be using and they should take this a step further and use a keyword planning tool (such as Google Keyword Planner) to ensure they have a complete list of industry keywords to work with. In most cases they should be working with a list of 10-15 keywords. It's also best practice to use at least one of your keywords in the first 2 sentences on every page.
2. PAGE TITLES
Every page on your website should have a page title. When Google lists your website in search results, your page title will be shown on the first line. This means it's extremely important to include relevant keywords people will be searching for, along with your business information in your page title. An effective format for structuring your page titles is: Keywords | Location | Business. For example, a page title for the home page of a yoga studio might be: Boutique Yoga Studio | Toowoomba | Mike's Yoga Studio. Ensure your SEO provider or web designer has added titles to every single page on your website and the titles are limited to 50-55 characters.
3. PAGE DESCRIPTIONS
Page descriptions are the text the search engine will display under the page title. This is usually consists of 1-3 sentences that sums up the purpose of the page to let the viewer decide if it is relevant to their search.
4. ALT-TEXT
This is the text embedded into the images on your website. The alt-text should accurately describe what the image is and should include one or more relevant keywords. This is helpful for image searches and helps boost the total number of keywords used across the website. The alt-text will also be displayed if the images don't load on the website, which can happen if the connection is disrupted or images have been disabled for whatever reason. Every relevant image on your website should have alt-text embedded.
5. INDEXING & BUSINESS REGISTER
This is probably the most important step towards improving your SEO. It is absolutely essential for any business, especially if your business has a physical location. Indexing is where your site-map is submitted to the search engine (e.g. Google Console) for crawling. This allows the search engine to have your text stored on their server and reduces the time taken for each search. Google prioritises websites that have been indexed because they don't slow the search down. Registering through Google My Business is also essential because it lets Google know your business exists and places a specific address to it that will display in search results where location is important, such as with a physical place of business.
If your SEO provider follows these 5 essentials, you can be sure you're getting a good service. Remember, you'll be competing with other businesses who may also have good a SEO game so your SEO provider cannot guarantee the top spot of any search. All they can do is provide the framework that makes it possible.