What's Wrong with My SEO?
You’ve build an attractive, user-friendly website and filled with fresh, valuable content, but you’re still not seeing the online traffic you’ve been hoping for. What went wrong? If your website isn’t showing up in online searches that your potential customers conduct when looking for information related to businesses like yours, your web traffic will be severely limited. By performing some simple SEO (search engine optimization) tweaks, you can make all of that interesting and informative content on your website easier for search engines to identify, categorize, and return to users in the results pages for appropriate search queries. Making your website easy for your target audience to find online naturally attracts more of your potential customers to it.
Page Titles
Each web page’s title tag is meant to describe its contents in a clear and concise way. It’s also what search engines like Google display as the main heading of your page’s link in the results pages. Generally speaking, aim to keep page titles to 55–60 characters or less to ensure that the entire title appears in search engine results. Your page title not only tells potential visitors what’s on your web page; it communicates similarly to search engines themselves, which makes them a vital aspect of your site’s SEO. When drafting page titles, use keywords that your potential customers are likely to search when looking for the kind of information you’re providing. This sends clear signals to both search engines and users that your content is relevant to their question.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions don’t directly affect your website’s placement in search engine results, but they can definitely influence whether a user clicks on your website link. The meta description appears below the link to your website and offers a brief snippet of text for users to preview. Encourage your audience to click your link with an enticing but clear description. Keywords are handy here to make your page’s relevance clear to the reader, but because meta descriptions don’t affect your site’s position on the page, the most important thing is that your descriptions engage your target audience. Keep them below 150–160 characters to minimize the chance that they’ll be cut short in results pages.
Alt Text
While a picture may be worth 1,000 words to your website viewers, search engines don’t understand the language. That’s where alt text comes in handy. Alt text consists of words you use to describe the images on your page. While there is not a hard, definitive limit on the number of characters to use in alt text, reputable sources range in recommendations from 70–200 as a maximum. When drafting alt text, use keywords that both accurately describe the image and pertain to the web page’s topic, if appropriate. Your #1 priority with all of these elements should be to provide accurate descriptions of your content, and your use of keywords should support this main goal. Misleading use of keywords could actually hurt your position in search engine results.
Links
Make sure the links on your website are current and functioning. A number of online tools are available that enable you to do this easily. When users click a link on your website and aren’t redirected to the page they anticipate, it degrades their experience—and Google understands this. As a result, a lot of old, dead links on your site can cause the search engine to determine that your site is less user friendly that it would otherwise be and reflect that judgment in a lower rank for your site the results pages.
If you’d like to learn more about improving your site’s SEO and engaging your target audience, click below to access our free eBook. If you’d like help boosting your brand’s online presence, contact Blue Frog Marketing. We provide a broad spectrum of online marketing services as well as web design, graphic design, and commercial printing. Headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa, we serve clients across the U.S. and in Canada.
