SEO—search engine optimization—is an essential part of how your website gets found by your ideal customer. In a nutshell, SEO is the way that a search engine evaluates your website and returns it as a result of a query from a user. This evaluation encompasses many aspects (Google Ranking Factors uses more than 200 elements!). But don’t worry, there are some quick and easy ways to consistently optimize your site’s SEO.

Keywords

Keywords are exactly that: words that best describe your business that are the same as those that a person may use to look for a business like yours. Take BW Concepts for example—keywords that someone may use when looking for digital marketing are:

• social media management, social media, how do I make business social media work
• blogging, blog, blogger
• newsletter, business newsletter, how to write a business newsletter

You get the picture. So, the more times and ways that those keywords appear on my website in a meaningful way, the more likely my site is going to be on the SERP—search engine results page—and at a higher priority.

Easy ways to incorporate keywords into your site are a blog, social media scroll, and videos.

Images + Information

Images on a site are not only visually important, they’re also an easy way to boost SEO. Now, a web crawler that is evaluating your site can’t interpret an image. BUT it can evaluate the information you assign to the image, also known as Alt Text. Completing all of the image information in a descriptive way allows for a faster and easier analysis of your site.

Including at least one relevant image per page is a good rule to live by. And same as keywords, blogs and social media scrolls and videos all help to check this box!

Blogs

Okay, so we know blogs are great for incorporating relevant images and keywords consistently. But what else can they do? Blogs are fantastic for creating cornerstone content. Cornerstone posts are longer posts that give details about your business, answer frequently asked questions, or any other pertinent information that a potential or current customer would want and need.

Within your content, whether it’s a lengthy post or a simple one, there should be a good amount of relevant backlinks. There are two types of links: internal and external. They’re both important for different reasons. Internal links point back to other places in your website. Internal links assist web crawlers with analyzing your site. The anchored link sends the user to a more in-depth post about that anchor link; it allows the crawler to get more information quickly and easily. In addition, these internal links create what’s known as “link juice.” Think of your home page as having the most juice; when it’s then linked to another page, it shares some juice. The more the pages are linked to each other and the more times, the more evenly the link juice is shared, giving potency to the entire site, rather than just one page.

External links go away from your page to other websites. External links are more like a vote of confidence that two sites are linking information; it lends to the validity of the site. Each form of content, like a blog post, should have a minimum of one external link.

Security and Speed

You likely would identify security and speed as being a customer “must,” but these two are essential for SEO as well. Having great website security is as simple as having a security certificate for your site—you know you have one if your site’s URL has an “s” after “HTTP.” Fast loading times are achieved in a few ways but mostly through great site hosting. BW Concepts utilizes Hammersmith Support’s monthly website maintenance service which includes their premium WP Engine hosting so our site runs smoothly, quickly, and safely!

Let’s Talk

Does all of this have you thinking your site could use some love? I’d love to talk with you—even just to answer your questions and explore your options! I am an expert at developing strategic content for small businesses that feed not only blogs but social media posts and newsletters too. I make each of these aspects work together to create interesting, attractive, and—most importantly—effective digital content. Drop me a line and let’s chat about how BW Concepts can get your digital footprint to the next level.