Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been around for more than 20 years.
It’s the process of optimizing your company website to rank higher in the search results. A site that has good SEO also offers a valuable user experience.
But it wasn’t always like this…
Back in the early days of SEO, many website owners attempted to manipulate the search results by “stuffing” their website with the same keyword over and over again. These kinds of “tricks” led to horrible user experience and flooded the search results with poor quality websites.
Google realized this and started to improve their algorithms which were responsible for how high a website ranked for a particular keyword. Nowadays, SEO is all about creating a good user experience and a site that is easy for the Google “bots” to crawl and index.
In short, SEO is about providing value to whoever visits your website.
We’re going to look at five tips you can immediately do to your website which can help improve its SEO.
Site Speed
A slow website doesn’t offer a very good user experience. Many things can cause a site to run slow. Huge image sizes, bloated or “spaghetti” code or even a poor hosting server can all contribute to a website taking forever to load.
Google has a free tool that you can use to determine how fast (or slow) your website is.
PageSpeed Insights will allow you to enter in the URL of your website. Google will then send a bot to crawl your website. In a few seconds, it will provide a report of your site speed as well as anything that could be causing it to slow down.
Backlinks
Have you ever wondered how Google determines how to rank websites on page 1 for a particular keyword?
While many factors could cause this, one of the biggest ones is how many backlinks a website has. A backlink is simply a link from a high-powered, relevant website to yours.
You can use free tools such as
Moz Keyword Explorer to look at how many backlinks your website has. If it says that your website doesn’t have very many, then it could benefit you to hire a
Raleigh SEO company to come in and assist with backlink generation.
Content
How much unique content do you have on your website?
Websites with little to no unique content don’t rank too well in the Google search results.
This is because a site with little to no content offers a poor user experience. You can fix this by adding at least 500 words of unique content to each of your web pages.
A regularly updated blog can also help. If you don’t have the time to write high-quality content, you can always hire a
professional Raleigh copywriter to help out.
When adding content, be sure only to add unique content. There are companies out there who will write your content for you, but it won’t be unique. It will be the same content they wrote for other websites. Google considers this to be “duplicate content” and can have a severe adverse effect on your SEO rankings.
Mobile Friendliness
Google has
repeatedly stated that mobile phones account for 1/2 of all internet searches. The problem with browsing the internet on a mobile phone is that the screen size is tiny. Many older websites will not work correctly on a cell phone screen.
Google tends to show favor to websites that are “mobile friendly” (or “responsive”). You can check to see if your website is mobile-friendly by using a
free Google tool.
If your website isn’t very mobile-friendly, then you can always look into
mobile website design services that will help bring your website up to date and allow it to work with all mobile phones.
Google Search Console
Another great tool you can use to determine if there are any SEO issues with your website is the free
Google Search Console. Just create a free Google account then follow the step-by-step instructions on how to add your site.
Google will begin to crawl and analyze your website. After a few hours you can log in to the Search Console and Google will tell you if any SEO issues could potentially be negatively affecting your website.
Raleigh SEO Company
If you would like your company website to drive more traffic, leads, and sales, give AlphaGraphics of Downtown Raleigh a call. We’re more than just a print shop. We’re also marketing experts and can help you diagnose any SEO issues with your website and begin optimizing it so that it has a chance to rank higher in the organic search results.
To learn more about how AlphaGraphics of Downtown Raleigh can produce and design your next project, you may
email us or
request a quote or call us at
(919) 832-2828.