How To Optimize Your Website Images For SEO

By Peter Brittain on September 25, 2018 in Image Optimisation

It should be safe to assume that your business website contains images; if it doesn’t, then the question has to be, ‘Why not?’. Images are a great way to engage with, inform and entertain customers, but what many website owners don’t realize is that images can also play a role in onsite SEO. More importantly, there are some simple steps you can take about the images on your website that can boost your site’s ranking in the eyes of Google.

In hindsight, using the term ‘eyes of Google’ might be a tad misleading because, despite all their top-level programming and sophisticated algorithm updates, Google cannot see the images on a website as human eyes see them. Their spiders which crawl the internet and analyse websites, can only recognise text. This means that no matter how colourful, large, exciting, or high-quality any website image is, Google will not see that.

This means that for Google to know that your images are relevant to your website’s content and subject matter, you need to add something called ‘alt text’.

For example, if you had a website selling sports shoe products, one of those products was Nike Air Jordan 14 Retro, you would likely have a page for this product and an image of them. When you upload the image, you will enter alt text such as ‘Air Jordan 14 Retro Sports Shoes’. Now, when Google’s spiders come calling, they will be able to read that text, and therefore the page gets more ranking juice for that keyword phrase.

4 Steps To Fix A Drop In Your Rankings

By Peter Brittain on September 25, 2018 in Ranking Factors

As soon as they sense a drop in their ranking many business owners panic and think that they are on the slippery slope to page 5 of Google. Thankfully, in most cases the situation is temporary, and even if the drop is sustained, there will be an explanation for it.

What it will mean is carrying out some simple checks to determine why the ranking drop happened. Some of those checks will involve using SEO research tools so it might mean you need to employ a SEO consultancy or agency to carry them out.

Here is a guide to 4 of those checks that can be made in order to find the culprit and reverse the drop.

#1 Is Your Website In Full Working Order?

It is astonishing that many business owners do not look in on their website on a regular basis, and so if anything happens to go wrong on it, they do not become aware of this until their rankings start going south.

There are some really basic things you need to check such as the expiry dates of your domain registration or your hosting. Yes, it does happen that a website disappears from rankings because the business owner forgot to renew their hosting service or their domain.

Also, check if your hosting company is having any problems or outages. While most hosting services will be up well over 99.5% of the time, it could be that 0.5% downtime that is the issue.

Simple Keyword Strategies To Outrank Your Competition

By Peter Brittain on July 22, 2018 in SEO

The internet has billions of web pages, and many of them are competing to be noticed by Google in order to move up the search rankings for that coveted page one of results. There are lots of SEO tactics and strategies that will help achieve this, and one of the most important is optimizing the page for the keywords you want to rank for. Here are some very simple ways to ensure that any, and all web pages on your website have the best chance of improving their ranking with the use of keywords.

Researching Keywords
The mystique surrounding keywords, and how best to optimize for them has led to countless theories and complicated strategies about how it should be done. In reality, optimizing a page for keywords is not that difficult, and only requires some very straightforward actions.

Keywords for SEO
The first of these is to do proper keyword research to establish which keywords and keyword phrases you need to target to be able to challenge those sites which currently occupy the first page of results within your niche. There are numerous keyword research tools available, with the most obvious one being the free AdWords keyword tool that Google offers.

If you really want to dig deep, to the extent that you know what keywords your competitors are targeting, how highly they rank for those keywords, and where they are getting backlinks from, paid tools such as Ahrefs can give you all that information. It cannot be stressed enough how important this sort of keyword research is. It can mean the difference between knowing exactly what keywords to target and then creating the content to match versus aimlessly creating content that achieves nothing.

The Correct Ways to Use Anchor Text to Improve Your SEO

By Peter Brittain on February 8, 2017 in Technical SEO

Whenever you create a backlink you can either have it be displayed as the URL that is pointing to or you can use anchor text which effectively cloaks the link. Using both methods will help your SEO, but anchor text links can have a greater impact in terms of letting Google know which keywords the page the link is pointing to, should be ranked for.

While this is a great way to help your SEO, the danger exists that you could overdo it by using the same exact match keyword every time, and instead of your anchor text links helping your ranking, they hamper it, as Google thinks you’re using spam tactics.

One of the ways to avoid any issues with Google is to mix up the way in which you use anchor text. There are several types of anchor text you can use for links, as you are about to find out.

Exact Match Keyword: Although we have already mentioned you should not overdo it with exact match keywords, it doesn’t mean you should avoid using them. The best way to use this strategy is for each page of content you have on your website targeting more than one keyword phrase. This means that when you are using anchor text in a link, you have more than more exact match keyword you can use when setting up the link back to the page in question.

Naked URL: We mentioned this is in the intro, but we need to emphasize that using the basic URL of the page you are linking to should happen occasionally. Google is far less suspicious of websites that have raw URL links than those which have only anchor text. The obvious benefit of this is higher rankings because you are not thought of as a site that is spamming.

3 Things Designers Need to Know About SEO

By Peter Brittain on July 8, 2016 in Websites

When it comes to relevance and visibility of content, every person who is looking to build a good online presence for their company knows the importance of good SEO practices. That being said, a lot of them fail to realize the importance of SEO practices when it comes to the design aspect.

There are some key concepts of SEO which experts are not exactly able to communicate with their designers well enough. That can leave a lot of problems because even if a website looks visually appealing, it might lack the crucial oversight of good SEO practices. That can affect the rankings significantly.

Here is a list of things that designers need to know about SEO in 2018 so that they can bridge the gap between excellent design and good SEO practices.

Mobile First
First things first, Google has made it quite clear for everyone out there that there is a need for optimizing websites for mobile phone usage with responsive design. The number of people using the internet through their mobile devices is more than those using it through their computers and that change in demographic needs to be catered to. Website designers need to make sure that the design of a website should not just be visually good for desktop computers, it can be equally well done but it will be more effective if it is optimized for mobile phone usage as a priority.

Organic Visibility
SEO experts are of the opinion that the website pages should be designed in a way that they are more accessible to search engines. This means the content organization for the website layout has to be on point.

Author: Peter-Brittain

How To Optimize Your Website Images For SEO

4 Steps To Fix A Drop In Your Rankings

Simple Keyword Strategies To Outrank Your Competition

The Correct Ways to Use Anchor Text to Improve Your SEO

3 Things Designers Need to Know About SEO

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