Getting to the first page of that Google (or Bing or Yahoo) search results page can mean huge things for your company: greater exposure, and in turn more business. There is a whole industry surrounding search engine optimization (SEO) and you could spend hours learning and researching this art.
So, you’ve got your website and you’ve thoroughly SEO’d it? Now check for these four things. With a few simple adjustments you can boost your search engine rankings even higher.
1. Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?
It is an established fact that search engines just want to give their users the best possible experience. They look at click-through rate and time spent on site to measure whether a result was useful to the searcher or not. If the back button gets hit to return to the search results page in a short space of time this indicates that the website didn’t float the searcher’s boat.
There is a strong trend toward people using mobile phones rather than computers for internet access. In fact, Google has said that in 10 countries, including Japan and the US, more mobile phones are used for Googling than computers. If your website is not optimized for use on mobile phones or tablets, you’re living in the past.
Not only are you lagging behind the times but you’re risking your search engine rankings. Searchers on mobile phones will click the link to your site, the link won’t load or the site won’t work well on their phone, and they’ll click the back button, sending the message to Google that your site wasn’t relevant or helpful to their query.
2. Are You Thinking Beyond The Click?
Getting people to click on the link to your site is just one piece of the puzzle. For higher search engine rankings you want to show the search bots that people engage once they’re on your site. Links are a critical part of SEO, but you want to make sure that the links are getting clicked.
Ensure that your site has the ability for people to share, comment, and click through to other sites or other pages of your own site. Encourage them to do so. Behavior on site is an indicator of the quality of the site. If people are engaging on your site, your search engine rankings will be boosted.
3. Have You Used Alt Text On Your Images?
Search robots only have the ability to search texts. You could have the most relevant and useful video and infographic on your page, but the bots won’t be able to find it. That’s where Alt Text comes in.
Go through the images on your site and check that they’ve all got an Alt Text tag. This is a way of describing what’s in the image in a hidden text form so that it will be flagged by search bots.
4. Are You Linking With All Your Social Media?
This is so simple and yet criminally under-utilized. All of your social media accounts should contain links to your webpage in their bios and in the posts. It doesn’t have to be in-your-face, but a link to your website that is easy to find is critical for driving traffic to your site. While not directly related to search engines, this can be essential for a higher search engine rank. More clicks from social media indicates that your site is popular, so when a searcher queries something related to your site, the search engine knows that you are popular, so ranks you higher up the results page.
Don’t forget Google+. This is Google’s own social media platform and therefore it’s prioritized by the search bots. Simply by having a Google+ profile you can improve your rankings, but a good profile with links to your website is the best way forward.
Ask yourself these four simple questions. It’ll take you very little time for a huge amount of reward. If you’re not tweaking your website in these few simple ways, you’re missing out on tons of clicks and higher search engine rankings.