Welcome back to Part 2 on how to start SEO marketing. In this article, we will look at how to optimize your individual pages and content pieces as well as improving the user experience through SEO.
Your Pages
Previously, we talked about incorporating the right keywords into your content to optimize it for search engines. However, there are a few more steps to take to make things easier for Google.
Internal Links
In Part 1, we discussed the importance of backlinks. However, internal links are important too! This means linking to other relevant pages within your own site.
Make these links accessible in the text on your page by using anchor text. This means that the link is embedded into a clickable text instead of just hanging around as a naked URL.
Ideally, anchor text should represent the link it leads to ie. the keyword or topic so that Google can understand what the link is about. A well-linked page is good, but don’t overload the page with too many unnecessary (and unrelated) links.
Do also keep page links updated, without too many redirections and avoid broken links at all costs! This ties back into how search engines crawl pages, and get annoyed and leave if there are too many roadblocks.
On-page Images
Often a webpage is much more than just text, what keeps visitors engaged is often the use of great images like infographics or photos to break up all the text.
This is where image optimization comes into play.
- Make use of the right format for your data:
- PNGs are used for images like vectors and graphic designs that have clear lines or transparent backgrounds
- JPGs should be used when high definition is needed, like in photography
- GIFs are used for images that include animations
- Don’t include overly large image sizes as this will slow page loading
- Alt tags or alternative text is a description read to visually impaired users so they can understand images. Google also uses these tags to index the image.
An important point to note is that search engines cannot crawl the image itself, so images should not be used for keywords that you want to be indexed.
User Experience
Search engine principals usually are in line with the internet user’s goals, after all, it’s good news when people make use of the search engine!
The first premise of the user experience is providing relevant content true to what is being searched for. So just using tactics in attempts to trick a search engine usually doesn’t work out in the long run.
Quality content that engages human readers is a big part of SEO.
International Webpages
Another aspect of improving a user’s experience would be having language and country options if you have a global presence.
- Use the Hreflang tag: this tells Google which language you are using on a specific page, so the search engine can use that result to users searching in that language.
- Multi-regional websites should choose a URL structure that makes it easy to target their domain or pages to specific countries. You probably have seen this before, they look like example.com/ca/.
This might seem a bit complicated, but do look out for them even if your website is being created by someone else.
Mobile SEO
A big part of user experience nowadays is a seamless transition from desktop to mobile. After all, everyone is on their smartphones. Google has recognized this too and supports mobile-friendly sites, providing a free page to test a URL’s mobile-friendliness.
The best way to handle this is to incorporate Responsive Web Design into your webpage. This allows the page to automatically display correctly for different screen sizes and devices. This is accomplished by adding a viewport meta tag to all webpages on the site.
Conclusion
We’ve come to the end of our how-to SEO guide for beginners. Hopefully, you’ve learned some new technical aspects of SEO that you can use right away. Start out with these basics and small changes, you might be surprised by the impact they have.