7 Ways to Take Control of Your SEO
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7 Ways to Take Control of Your SEO
Let’s face it, most marketers are not developers and have little if any understanding of HTML and CSS. Increasing traffic to your website by climbing in the search rankings, or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is now considered Marketing 101. Making your website as SEO friendly as possible is becoming increasingly more important as the future of being found on the web moves to voice search, top answer boxes, and video results. If you’re an organization with a small budget, limited knowledge of coding, or an old website, we have a few things you can do to increase your SEO standing. Here is our list of 7 things you can start today to move your way closer to page one.
Claim and Fix Your Directory Listings Online
There are hundreds of directory listings online that search engines crawl to confirm basic information about your company. All of the inconsistent information on the web is hurting your rating with these search engines. Start with the major ones and pick away at them as often as you can, start with the biggest… Google My Business, Bing, Yelp, Yahoo, Foursquare, Yellow Pages.
Social Media
Use your social media pages to draw people back to your website, be as active and consistent on your pages as you can. Make sure that you claim your social media pages just in case you might use them in the future. YouTube is a great example, you may not utilize it now, but you will want to secure your company’s name for a page for when you do decide to venture into videos before someone else takes it.
Links
Inbound links are very important, as are where they are coming from. The more credibility a website has, the more it gives to yours when they link to your site. Work with some major companies or organizations? See if they will provide a link to your site from theirs to give your site a boost.
Mobile Friendly
If you put any money at all into your website, make sure it’s to make it mobile friendly. If your site does not scale on a mobile device, you are losing a majority of the people that land on it. For search engines, the user experience trumps all, so it’s impossible to ever make it to page one unless this is fixed.
Social Share Buttons
Add social share links to relevant pages, especially event and blog pages. The more your information is shared across the web the more credibility you have to search engines.
Optimize Your Images
This is important for the user experience. If your images are not loading for users, the file name and alt-text can tell the search engines what is there. Also, the alt-text can help your images show up in image searches across the web. Be sure to watch your file sizes, multiple MB size pictures can slow your websites loading time and hurt the user experience, be sure to shrink your files before uploading.
Website Structure
This is an easy one to test. Make a list of the most important content pages on your website and then make sure that from the homepage you do not need to click any more than three times to access any of those key pages. If users have to search deeper than three clicks, then they likely have given up and will drop off your site.
Start with these seven steps to rank higher and get your website found. You don’t have to be a techy to start helping your business or organization get found online. If you need help getting your events found, LocalHop provides free event promotion and posting to our event management platform. Ask us today how we can help get your events found.
