Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to build site traffic is one of the most cost-effective Internet marketing tactics available. Its defined as is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results. To help you, Google’s even created a starter guide that describes some techniques you can use to make your site rank better.
Webmasters modifying a site helps search engines value and reward sites for constantly-changing content. And don’t forget to keep track of your analytics – if you notice something isn’t working the way you expected, you can always change it back!
Here are some good changes to start with:
Meta tags
The descriptions entered into meta tags are not worth a lot in most search engine algorithms, but the meta text is still often displayed under the page title in the search engine results. Write your meta tags to include some keywords without being hard-to-read. Also make sure the text is informative, engaging, and representative of the content on your page, to encourage people to click and stay.
Alt text
When adding pictures to your blog post, try to find original pictures that are meaningful, not just pretty. Then add very descriptive alt text to the pictures, as well as descriptive file names. This can help your pictures be ranked higher in image searches, where it is often easier to rank for a high-quality term.
Alt text is also useful outside of search engines, as people with screen readers or other specialty devices cannot view or access the images, but can find the text.
Subheadings
Search engines give more weight to terms appearing in header tags within your text. Make sure your subheadings are literal and descriptive, and format them using Header 1, 2, and 3 tags instead of just making them bold. Remember that you can use CSS to format header tags to look however you want, but they still communicate importance to search engines no matter how they look.
Links
Don’t forget to include a few high-quality links in your body text. You can link to relevant posts internally, and you can also link to other great sites. It’s good to affiliate yourself with similar sites by linking to them.
Linking to other sites can also be a good link-building strategy as your blog begins to attract more visitors. Often, site owners will look into the major sources of their traffic, especially if they see a traffic spike, which will help your blog get their attention.
