RipFish Blog
SEO Tips for Your Indiana Business
Search Engine Optimization — You’ve heard of it, but the explanation starts sounding like Greek after a few sentences. Fortunately, there are a few quick tips to help you maximize your website’s search engine rankings. This means more visitors, more clicks, and more customers, and ensures you’ll be riding the SEO Speedwagon (sorry).
Google and other search engines like to provide quality content and sites for their users, and the best way to get Google to be your buddy is to make a helpful, well-designed website. Certain web design firms can definitely help you with that, but there are a handful of items to focus on to be sure you’re making the most of your website.
Headlines and Titles: If you quickly glance over a website, your eye will probably pull out the largest, boldest bits of information first. More than likely, that information is going to be in the page’s large headlines and titles. To help visitors and Google figure out what your website is all about, place your most important site keywords in the page headlines and title tags. If you’re a carpet cleaner in Pierceton, IN, for instance, be sure that “Carpet Cleaning” and “Pierceton, IN” appear in your page’s main headlines.
It’s All About Your Image: Images can make your site infinitely more visually appealing, but sadly search engines can’t do much with them. Images can’t be “read” like text can, and therefore Google doesn’t know what it’s looking at when it visits your site. However, with the use of “alt” tags in each image, you can verbally describe to search engines what the image is all about. Check with a web developer or your designer for a bit of help with alt tags.
Links, Links, Links: Beyond having a great website, one way Google determines how to “trust” your website (and therefore send more visitors to it) is based on the number of links back to your site elsewhere on the internet. If people have found your site valuable, maybe they’ll link to it on their own site or blog. Search engines use these links to determine how valuable your site is — the more links (generally), the more people have found your site to be useful. Ask friends and business partners to create links to your site, or ask for a link to your page on the site of a trade organization or network that you belong to.
Quality SEO requires time and maintenance. If some of these tips might be over your head (or a bit more time-consuming than you’d like), we’re here to help out. Contact us today!
