Two Simple Steps to Boost Your Organic Search Rankings

 

Two Simple Steps to Boost Your Organic Search Rankings

High organic rankings on Google and other search engines can have a tremendous impact on how your website performs for your business. This is no secret, and the competition is intense for high traffic/ high intent keywords. Not to worry, there are a couple simple steps you can take that will improve your organic rankings and help your get more traffic to your site; improving your Alt Text and Meta Tags. It’s important to note that these are not magical hacks that will take your site to the top of the serps, but they will certainly help you on your way to high rankings.

Alt Text

Alternative text are descriptions of images used in HTML code, they describe the appearance and function of images on your web page. Primarily these descriptions are used when the image can’t be displayed or for visually impaired users, however, they can help your organic rankings by providing more useful information for search engine crawlers.

Crawlers can have a difficult time interpreting images in the same way people do, so it’s best not to leave too much to interpretation and provide specific and succinct descriptions in your alt text. This, along with using quality image titles and file names, will help crawlers properly index your images so you can show in relevant search results, plus it’s always a good idea to jump on opportunities to implement relevant keywords to what you do. It’s important to keep them at less than 125 characters, as this is the limit for most screen readers.

A few things to think about when writing alt text:

·        Don’t stuff keywords, Google will penalize you for it

·        Avoid using images of text, crawlers will not be able to pick up the text on your images and you are missing out on potential impressions

·        Leave out unnecessary words like “picture of” or “photo of” because alt text is already specific to images

·        Be specific and descriptive for the most effective use of alt text. For example, if you have an image of a dog on your page, instead of using alt=”dog”, use something like alt=”black and white siberian husky with different colored eyes”

Meta Tags

Meta tags are chunks of text that generally show only in the source code of a page that describe to search engines what a page is about. There are lots of meta tags, including alt text, but there are two others that you should pay specific attention to in order to improve your rankings; Title Tags and Meta Description Tags.

Title Tags

These tags are visible to users as a clickable headline on serps and page titles in your browser tab. These tags are important for 2 big reasons, the first is that they tell search engines what your web page is about and secondly, it’s the first impression that users will get of your web page. These are crucial for showing in relevant searches and for click through rates.

It’s best practice to keep these tags under 60 characters. The actual limit is a bit tricky to nail because it’s based on pixels rather than characters, but 60 and less should do you well. When writing title tags, keep in mind who you’re writing it for. Be descriptive to show for relevant results on the search engine and write in a way that will attract your ideal customer. A good format might look like Keyword 1 – Keyword 2 | Company Name.

Meta Description

Meta descriptions are used to explain what a page is about to search engines. They are occasionally used as the description of a page in the serps. Although keywords in these tags won’t directly affect your rankings, they could indirectly affect them by increasing your clickthrough rate. It’s best practice to keep your meta descriptions under 150 characters.

Other Tags

There are a couple other tags to note; Meta Keywords and Meta Robots. Meta Keywords used to be important for rankings, however, due to keyword stuffing abuse most search engines, including Google, have stopped using them when ranking web pages. Meta Robots simply tell search engines what to do with your site. They tell the search engines whether to index your page or not and whether links on your pages are trustworthy.

Conclusion

HTML can be a bit intimidating to those who have little to no experience with it, however, these changes are easily implemented and can help your rankings on the search engines. There are lots of resources online to help you get more familiar with HTML and its well worth the small time investment to help your website’s performance on the search engines. If done well, your site traffic will improve, and your business will benefit.

Direct Placement, LLC is a digital marketing agency that offers a variety of digital ads and services. Our trained and certified team of Account Managers and Internet Marketing Advertisers is dedicated to helping your business achieve its advertising goals. They will work diligently with you to help ensure our advertising efforts are tailored to your specific needs. Contact Direct Placement, LLC today or visit our website to discover how we can start transforming your business one click at a time! You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Blogger for more online marketing related content.

Direct Placement makes digital marketing easy. Your Marketing Pro is a Google Premier Partner and ready to boost your ad to the top of search results. Get started now.