6 Quick and Easy Ways to Improve Your SEO (Part 2 of 2)
Guest writer: Brian Reiser
In the last part of our two-part series on Quick Ways to Improve Your SEO, we discussed three tactics that can have immediate benefits to your SEO program. These three tactics included:
Optimizing your page titles
Optimizing your meta descriptions
Optimizing your headers
In this second part of our two part blog series, we will discuss three more easy ways you can optimize your website for Google.
4. Internal Links
As you know, links are the bedrock of the internet. They are what make the web a “web” - it’s a web of hyperlinks. Links are also foundational pieces of SEO, and help Google understand what your content is all about like page titles, meta descriptions, and headers do.
“Internal” links are links that link from one place on a website to another place on the same website. For example, if the owner of Mary’s shoe store (we’ll call her Mary) wanted to create a link from the “women’s sneakers” page to the “men’s sneakers” page, this would be considered an internal link.
However, if Mary wanted to link to a business article on a news website like Fortune about how women’s sneakers are more popular than ever, this is an “external” link. It goes from a page on one website to a page on a different website.
The presence of internal links on your website are crucial for improving your SEO. They help Google understand which pages on your website relate closely to other pages on your website.
For example, creating links between these pages:
Women’s sneakers
Women’s shoes
Girl’s sneakers
Men’s sneakers
Men’s shoes
helps Google understand that sneakers, in general, are an important topic on your website.
Further, these internal links help Google understand that the more general topic “shoes” is also an important topic on your website. It enables Google to understand which subtopics, like “girl’s sneakers” or “women’s sneakers” are important on your website as well.
Another point about internal links: the more pages on your website that link to a particular page (page x) on your website, the more important Google will think that page x is.
For example, if 100 pages on your website link to your homepage but only 20 link to your “about” page, Google will think that the homepage is more important to your overall website than your about page is (and Google is probably right here). Keep this in mind when you think about which pages you want to link to most often on your site.
Another way to optimize your internal links for SEO is to place your keyword naturally in the anchor text of your link, which is simply the text that the reader sees and clicks on in the link.
For example, many people use “click here” or “click this” for their anchor text. But these phrases do not include a keyword and are not descriptive in any way. It gives no information to your users or to Google about what the link contains.
An improved link to the girl’s sneakers page on your website would be, “girls sneakers on sale” or any other phrase that included the important keywords and was relevant to the sentence.
5. External Links
Like internal links, external links are important for SEO. When you link to other relevant, authoritative and trusted websites, it helps to build your own authority, expertise, and trust in the eyes of Google and your users. It also lets Google know what the important topics of your website are in relation to the rest of the internet.
The point here is to link to relevant content on other websites. Fortune Magazine may be a trusted and authoritative website, but ranking to a Fortune article about the popularity of fishing or studying history at college likely have no relevance to Mary’s shoe store website.
On the other hand, articles about the increased popularity of tennis shoes or a decline in the average cost of sneakers may be extremely relevant to Mary’s content and audience. The latter are worth linking to in context and where appropriate. The former are not.
Like with internal links, the anchor text of your external links is very important for SEO. If you are linking to an article about sneaker sales, the anchor text “sneaker sales have increased by five percent” is much better than anchor text like “click here” or even “Fortune Magazine says”. Use relevant, keyword-rich anchor text for your external links to improve your SEO.
6. Add Image Alt Tags
You may not think SEO applies to images, but in fact it does. After all, you can do a Google search for images just like you can a Google search for web pages and written content.
Google cannot “see” images the way the human eye and mind can. One way to help Google understand what an image represents is by adding what is called image alt text (short for alternative text) to your image.
For example, let’s say Mary’s shoe store posts an image of one of their products on their website. This product is a pair of women’s Nike sneakers in blue with a white “Swoosh” logo. To help optimize this image for SEO we could write image alt text that says:
“A pair of women’s Nike sneakers, blue.”
Where does this code go? The image alt text is part of a snippet of code known as the “alt attribute” or “alt tag” within the image tag of HTML. The image tag, with the included alt attribute and alt text, would look like this:
<img src="image_name.jpg" alt="A pair of women’s Nike sneakers, blue.">
If for some reason a web browser is unable to load the image itself, it can also display the image alt text as an alternative to the image itself. That’s where the name “alternative attribute” or “alt tag” comes from.
Notice that in our image alt text, we used the keywords “women’s nike sneakers”. We also added the word “blue” which can be helpful if a searcher types in queries like, “women’s blue sneakers.”
While the main purpose of image alt text is to describe the image itself, there is often a natural way to add keywords to the image alt tags.
Finally, adding image alt text is beneficial for accessibility. People in your audience with low vision will be able to hear alt text read to them even if they are unable to see the image itself. That way, they can know exactly what is depicted by the image.
The Importance of SEO Content Writing
SEO content is content on a website designed to help you rank well on Google search for terms important to your business. Whether you are in the life sciences, tech, economic development, or any other space, SEO content writing is essential if you want to do well in organic search.
By ranking well for search terms important to your business, you will attract high-value visitors to your website who are likely to turn into qualified leads and ultimately convert into customers.
Additionally, by providing high-quality content that ranks well on Google, your business will be well-positioned as an expert authority and thought leader in your space, improving the overall value of your brand.
Learn more about SEO content writing on Lauren Perna Communications’ blog.
Brian M. Reiser has over seven years of hands-on experience navigating the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization. Learn more about Brian M. Reiser | Strategic SEO Consultant.
