Good search engine rankings are a reflect of good content or services presented in a organized and intelligible matter. Offering relevant content, with proper web standards, using correct text styling, relevant links and image description are some of the ways to help search engines understand your site better and reward you with better rankings. Below we detail each one of them so you can start today.
Use Keywords
After doing your keyword research and defining the kind of words visitors use to search for your products, you should start adding them to your content. Your product titles and description should carry some of those words. If possible you should also add them on your site’s tagline.
Proper HTML tags
Search engines “speak” the HTML language, so when they try to understand what a page is about in order to list it they look at the content and how it is organized. Much like people, they will interpret that a title, for example, is more important than a subtitle and they will do that by checking the HTML code. If your website isn’t coded correctly, they won’t be able to understand it.
Never underestimate bolds and italics
For the same reason explained above, search engines understand that whatever words are between <strong> or <em> tags should be considered more important. So if you are using HTML markups inadvertently just to change the looks of your site, be aware that you might be telling search engines that those words are more important than others when it comes to indexing.
Offer relevant links
In early days, anything that made users navigate away from your website was considered bad. Today, this is not necessarily true, since most users browse on several different tabs at the same time. Search engines consider that a website linking to relevant related content is trustworthy. Linking to things that are related to your business (i.e. Authority Guides, Industry Awards, Infographics) helps search engines better decipher the topic or context of your website.
Image description
As mentioned above, search engines “speak” HTML, and they don’t necessarily understand images yet. So to help them out, you should take advantage of any text that relates to the image. Start by choosing relevant file name. Instead of naming a product image DSC_1234.jpg use something that is more descriptive of the image. Same thing goes for the alt attribute. Remember the alt text is what will be visible if your image isn’t for some reason. A good example of image usage would be something like:
<img src="acme-red-mug.jpg" alt="Acme Red Mug" />
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