In our fourth post in the series “How to Start and Setup SEO”, today we’ll be examining the more technical aspects of how SEO works, and specific things on the page that search engines look for.
Technical SEO refers to the optimization of the elements on your page to optimize the way search engine ‘crawlers’ index your site. Aspects we’ll look at today include: alt tags, meta tags, among others.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are HTML elements than are meant to describe the page to search engine crawlers. The most common of these are the meta title, and the meta description. The meta title specifies your page’s title, and the description is meant to provide a short description of the page’s contents.
These are important to have on each page to ensure that you are getting the most out of your page optimization. In addition, the browser also uses these. For example, the ‘meta title’ is used as the text in the browser tab’s title.
Alt Tags
Alt tags are further ways to tell search engine’s the content of your page, in addition to being used by screen readers to help your site’s accessibility. Alt tags are placed on different elements contained in your page such as buttons, images, and links. These are also sometimes used by the browser. For example, if you hover your mouse over an element with an alt tag, that alt tag will become viewable.
Alt tags are important for use on your images. Say you post an image with text that explains things on your page, or helps with your content. This is a great addition to your page, but because Google can’t read these directly you won’t really be helped in your rankings at all. To solve this, the alt tag was created. You use the alt tag to describe what is in the image and rank for those keywords.
Mobile Friendliness
Mobile friendliness has been a major ranking factor in Google’s algorithm for over a year now. Simply put, mobile Friendliness means that your site has been coded so that it displays well on small, mobile phone screens. You realize how important being mobile friendly is when you’re confronted with the fact that more than half of internet traffic in the United States is from mobile devices. If you want your site to work well for everyone, it must be mobile optimized. Google and other search engines will actually give you a penalty in the search rankings if your site is not mobile friendly.
If you want to check if your site is mobile friendly you can use Google’s Free Mobile-Friendly Test. If you need help optimizing your site for Mobile Friendliness, skip to the last section, Border7 can help you out!
Unique Content
Unique content is the single most important thing for your website’s SEO. Creating unique content that can only find by going to your site will cause your traffic levels to skyrocket. In addition, Google will see this page as something unique and rank it higher as a result.
Never try and produce the same content as your competitors, in order to stand out, you will need an effective marketing method that will keep users interested and promote engagement. If you’re interested in learning more about effective content creation, check out Part 3 of our “How to Start and Setup SEO” blog series.
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