Just built a charming website? Great. But who cares if no one sees it? These simple SEO tricks and tweaks will help you rank well in Google, Bing, and other search engines and get your site seen.
There are many reasons to create a website. Maybe you built an great product that you’re ready to sell online. Perhaps you’ve written your magnum opus, a personal essay that will certainly win the Pulitzer once it’s uploaded to the internet. Maybe you just want to share your hobbies with the world. Unfortunately, none of that matters if no one visits your website.
If you want people to discover your website, search engine optimization (SEO) is a must. SEO is a blanket term for the processes that webmasters use to boost their sites’ chances of ranking well in search engines, such as Bing and Google. Whether your site is running on a shared, VPS, or dedicated server, you should leverage SEO so that your site (hopefully!) appears on the first results page after someone keys a term into a search engine. The following SEO tips won’t guarantee superb results placement, but they’re essential for helping search engines—and people, by extension—find your site.
Build a Well-Designed Website with great SEO
If your site is new, large, or contains many multimedia files, considering creating a sitemap. That’s a file that provides search engines with the information they need to swiftly crawl and index site pages, video, and audio. Google has a useful sitemap generator. Bing does, too. In fact, your website must contain a sitemap in order to appear in Google News.
A crawler, also called a spider program or bot application, is software used by Google to process and index the content of web pages.
In addition, your website should encourage visitors to explore and share your content. Selling products? Your homepage should spotlight at least a few optimized product images (more on that later). Running a blog? Link to your latest posts and marquee essays. These actions appeal not only to visitors, but search engines, too. It shows them what you consider important.
On the backend, your website’s title field should distill the entire site down to its name and relevant keywords, as that’s what appears in search results. So, carefully choose your site’s name and keywords to attract people and spiders. We’ll show you how to do that in just a bit.
The backend of the website is one of the most important components of a website and acts as the backbone of a website, while the frontend is just the perspective developed for users.
Lastly, don’t underestimate the value of an attractive website. If your site looks like an old GeoCities page, people will leave, never return, and search for a more professional-looking competitor. That’s lost visitors, valuable external links, social media buzz, and revenue. NRGO New Age Digital has the tools to quickly build an attractive, functional website.
Focus on a Specific Topic
Search engines want to point people toward the most authoritative and correct results. So, if you’re an expert in a particular topic that you wish to explore, your website’s content should reflect that. Want to share your recipes with the world? Then food should be your site’s focus. Don’t blend pancake content with, say, metalworking. After all, it’s unlikely that your website is a massive multinational corporation or a large news organization that needs to be all things to all people.
Specificity is also key. If you’re a fisherman with an excellent perspective on fly fishing, as opposed to deep-sea angling, that’s what your website should be about. Lean into what you bring to the table; it’ll help your web presence.
Optimize Your Website Images properly
On the web, images are the way we color inside the lines; bright, clean images make a website inviting. Beyond that, images highlight the product or services that you want to sell, and break up large text blocks to keep readers engaged. Images are important, so you should take time to optimize them.
The first step in optimizing your images for the web is to shrink them down to a manageable size. You should keep each image under a megabyte in size; even smaller if your have an image-heavy page. Resizing images to a maximum 1920 by 1080-pixel resolution and using the JPG or WEBP formats will help your pages quickly load. Search engines do not like slow-loading sites.
Content management systems (think WordPress) typically have Alt fields, so you can easily type in an image keyword. If you prefer to edit HTML, the alt attributes work like this:
<img src=”/cool_dude.jpg” alt=”Man typing an article” width=”1920″ height=”1080″>
Get into the habit of adding this clarifying text to all of your website images.
These SEO tips are just the tip of the search engine optimization iceberg, but they’re an excellent starting point. Ranking well in Bing, Google, Yandex and other search engines won’t happen overnight, so be patient as you apply these tips to your website. And return here often! We’ll update this page with more useful SEO tips on a regular basis.
