If you own a brand and you have yet to see your website pop up on local search results, don’t be discouraged. All it takes is a few tweaks to your website and a little more knowledge under your belt, and your SEO ranking will be out of this world! You will see your website at the top in no time.

Studies show that the top page of Google has a 33% better chance of getting clicked. This means that if your website is not sitting at the top of Google search results, that you just lost out on a third of your potential traffic! Research also shows that 75% of people don’t make it to the second page of the search results. This means that if your website is not on the first page, then it doesn’t matter where your site is because it will never be seen. 

There are hundreds of simple ways that you can improve your SEO ranking. A few changes here and there will land you a spot on the first page. From there, you will be on your way to more web visitors, increased sales and revenue. Although there are hundreds of ways that you can optimize your website for SEO, you only have to make a few changes to see a huge difference. You’ll be immensely boosting your chances of getting found on Google. Here are five ways that you can optimize your website to improve your SEO ranking.

1. Check your Page Titles 

Page titles are incredibly important for SEO ranking. This is because page titles are the first thing that users see when they search for something online. One effective way to optimize your website is to check all of your page titles. This means that you should check every title on every page, article, and piece of content to make sure that they are engaging, grammatically correct, and loaded with keywords. Your SEO titles should be accurate, meaning that they should accurately reflect what your page is about. Your titles should also be succinct, meaning that they should be briefly and clearly expressed. The most important thing is to make sure that your page titles include keywords.

2. Always Include Meta Descriptions

The meta description on a website is the little paragraph that is displayed underneath the page title in the search results. The meta description is there to provide the user with extra information related to the website, helping users decide whether or not your site information is what they need. One way that you can improve your SEO ranking is to make sure that all of the pages on your website have a meta description. That little blurb of information is more important than you think! Meta descriptions are meant to drive more relevant traffic to your site and keep users sticking around. Make sure that your meta description clearly states what your page is about, contains keywords targeting the right audience, and is written in the right context. 

3. Create Internal Links 

If you haven’t already, you need to be creating internal links between pages on your website. It may seem odd, but linking pages within your website will bring in more visitors and keep them sticking around. Google actually favors websites who have internal links because its web crawlers are able to index the site’s pages much more easily and it creates a better user experience. When you create internal links, you are allowing users to spend more time on your site and locate pages easier. Your users will be much happier, more likely to trust you and also more likely to return in the future. More visitors now will show Google that your page is valuable and will eventually boost your SEO rating. 

4. Insert Alt Text with Images 

Who doesn’t love a good picture with a page of content or informative article? Images enhance the user experience and make your website fun and interesting! But, unfortunately, Google cannot see those images unless you add “Alt Text” or an “Alt Tag” to the image. So, in order for Google to see those images, you have to provide a description, or something that Google can interpret and recognize as a picture. Google needs that text to be able to understand!

Alt Texts are used within an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. To improve your website SEO, make sure that you tag every image that you upload onto your site. You need to make sure that every single photo has an Alt Text tag. This is so important because Google needs to understand the image and index it. Your ideal Alt Text should include keywords relevant to your page and its information. 

5. Make your URLS Clear and Concise

Have you ever paid attention to your page URLs? They actually play a big role in your website SEO! URLs are the addresses on the top of each page. Your URLs actually show up underneath the title in your search results. Because your URLs are actually being seen, you want to make sure that they look clean and easy to read. Messy or cluttered URLs can be confusing to your visitors. They can often appear as untrustworthy, spammy, and unclear. An easy-to-read URL might be your ticket to more traffic, more clicks, and increased sales. The difference between a clean URL and cluttered URL could mean a few extra dollars in your pocket at the end of the year. 

As previously mentioned, there are hundreds of ways that you can optimize your website to boost your SEO ranking. These five tips on improving your website optimization will get you one step closer to seeing your website ranked on Google. Keep in mind that most of this optimization deals with double checking your website for errors and fixing little things here and there. If you don’t see your website or your page of content on the top of the page, don’t give up! Keep optimizing your page and search engines, such as Google, will start to notice. Your website will be on that front page in no time!

Did you know that organic search is most often the primary source for web traffic? That places a big weight on the shoulders of search engines. Because organic search is most often used, SEO has become a main tactic for putting websites in the position to be seen by web visitors.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is all about brand exposure, website ranking, credibility, increasing the quantity and quality of web traffic, and creating a better experience for web visitors. 

Search Engine Optimization is a method of increasing a website’s ranking on search engine results such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, Bing, and many more. There are hundreds of factors that go into search engine rankings. These factors help websites get closer to ranking at the top of search results.

Why is it important?

A website that ranks at the top of the search results page will have more web traffic. That is just a fact! This is just one of the many reasons why businesses optimize their website. It is one more way that those businesses can gain traffic. Not only does great SEO increase website traffic, but it also increases yearly sales and revenue. Optimizing your website for SEO is an important step in getting your brand noticed. In its essence, SEO makes your website more visible, trustworthy, and credible.

How does SEO work?

SEO can only be truly understood when you understand the purpose of search engines. 

A search engine is meant to provide impartial search results that detail and present information as quickly and as accurately as possible. In order for a search engine to provide you those quick results, they need to be able to identify and analyze websites all over the Internet that match what you are looking for.

There are over 1 billion websites in existence today. Search engines are working overtime to pick through active, inactive, quality, and subpar websites to display high-quality and relevant results. Just think about that for a second! We do not give search engines enough credit. Nowadays, we just expect search engines to display results in two seconds. We don’t even think about the work that goes on behind the scenes to make those results pull up quickly and accurately. 

For example, let’s say that you typed “Restaurants near me” into Google. You wait a few seconds and local restaurants begin to pull up. You may not have realized this before, but Google is analyzing tons of data from different websites before displaying them to you. Want to know something crazy? Search engines are analyzing data ALL the time! They actually never stop analyzing data. That’s how you know that the websites perched at the top of the page are relevant and high-quality!

How do search engines analyze so much data?

But wait! How are search engines able to analyze so much data on millions of websites everyday?

Their secret? Web crawlers. 

A web crawler, sometimes known as a spiderbot, is an Internet bot that systematically and regularly browses the web for the purpose of indexing. Web crawlers look for specific things when browsing websites. Search engines use web crawler’s information to separate the high-quality sites from the subpar sites. The high-quality sites that use SEO-friendly techniques are ranked higher. Those will be the websites that you see at the top of the page when you search for anything specific. 

The websites at the top of the page are deemed “trustworthy” because they contain most of the necessary information needed to have the best SEO. The websites on the second, third and fourth pages aren’t necessarily “untrustworthy”, but they are missing a few things that would boost their ranking even higher! The ways that you optimize your website have a direct effect on your SEO ranking. There are hundreds of different ways that you can improve your SEO. One way that you can get started is by improving your keywords.