Ok, so during the last 20 years i have seen a lot of big organizations with large budgets running shitty websites for years. As a SEO person and business owner, I wonder why that is. Lack of knowledge comes to my mind first, or perhaps the owners of the company have a family member working on the IT department and they have no clue on what’s going on with SEO and web development, whatever the scenario is, below are some of the most important items you need to have in place to get decent rankings in Google.
#1 Unique content
Everyone will tell you the content is king. That doesn’t meant that you are going to write stupid shit that doesn’t benefit anyone. Less is more sometimes but if you are going to write an article that you hope will get google snippet rankings, you need to be ready to create a master piece with at least 7 images and about 1,200 words or more. Yes, that’s what it takes to appear under the “zero” ranking section.
With so many competitors out there, you have to make sure your article offers a solution or benefit to the end user. Besides the content, you should list other resources where you are getting your information from. Links from authority websites are very important so keep that in mind when creating copy. Dont forget to implement schema markup to this page/article, this is a must.
#2 SEO Friendly Title Tags
They are about 200 different algorithm factors in Google. Title tag and meta tags (keywords/description) structure should really be on the top of your list. Yes, i’m aware that a lot of SEO newbies will say don’t bother with the “keywords” meta tags but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Enter this information on every page but without stuffing too many keywords and make sure the content is relevant to that page/article. The TITLE tag content has to be a mix of the phrase you are going after and a “soft” call to action (CTA) for the user to click on your page from the Google results. What I’m saying here is that you need to write the page not just for search engines but also for humans to interact with your page. Good luck with that! Seriously now, over the years they are still some SEO magic you can apply to get rankings using title tags, but make sure your titles are appealing to the reader/searcher to bring them to your site.
That’s really step #1, bring them to the site, the second one is to make sure they are spending some “quality” time on your site and that they at least visiting 2 pages to avoid high bounce rates. Below is sample of a decent title tag from the search “Best Scooter for kids” these dudes have the #5 position in google for this competitive phrase, so def spend some time creating unique title tags.
#3 Image Tagging, aka – ALT Tags
If done properly, optimized images can you bring some nice organic traffic without going too crazy. Whenever you are using an image, make sure the name supports the content you are creating. So let’s say you are writing a piece that talks about stress and how yoga can help lower your stress levels. The name of the image should have the words “yoga” and “lower stress” within the name. if someone is searching for “how can yoga lower stress”, that image has a pretty good chance to appear under the google results. When it does, Google will show the link to the page hosting that image, this is a good way to get image “rankings” and also a powerful back-link from Google. The pic below shows a sample of ALT image value.
the page hosting this image has a #3 position for the phrase I mentioned above. So don’t forget to enter your ALT values accordingly, they will help!
#4 Internal & Outbound links
This one is essential as well. You can’t have a page without text links pointing to your internal pages and external resources and expect decent rankings. I should clarify this actually, i have achieved rankings using pages with ZERO outbound links and a low internal internal link ratio but they were other factors that help me achieved those rankings. So lets go back to the links. You have to keep some balance when it comes to the links depending on the size of the page.You shouldn’t have more than 5 internal text links on a 1,000 words article. For the same amount of content, the external links should be no more than 3, 2 links preferably. The text links need to have purpose, link to pages that are going to benefit from that link. So if you are speaking about “Nike sneakers” and you have a page to talks about “Nike sneakers for women” you should link to that page. this will help the page receiving the link. As far as linking to external resources, it wouldn’t hurt you to link to the NIKE website but make sure you are opening a NEW window so that you keep your visitors on your site always. use the (_blank) link attribute.
1 comment
The ALT image tagging is something all web developers should be doing for their clients.