The days of depending on traditional advertising methods such as radio, tv, newspaper, billboards, magazine ads and direct mail are over. Search Engine Marketing is by far the most effective method to target your market and track your advertising success. Why? Because well over 75% of Americans get the information they want about a product, service or company through a web search. And most importantly, when a consumer does a Google Search for a product, service or company they are immediately a Qualified Lead. How so? Because they have typed the info they want into the search field and hit the Return button. That is the equivalent of flipping through the Yellow Pages to a business section and calling the number of a business you want to communicate with concerning their product or service. More about the gruesome death of the printed Yellow Pages in an upcoming blog.
But now, on to an important but often overlooked part of building a successful website—Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Proper SEO practices will boost your web traffic through search engine results and will help your site’s organic search performance. The effective SEO development of your website determines how your company website performs on Google search as well as the other search engines. This is one of the most important aspects of what we do for clients at Navigation Advertising because once you have your new, shiny website, you want people to actually go to it. That is where SEO Best practices come into play; actually getting your website in front of consumers who are searching for your product or service.
With that, lets go over some basics so you have an idea of how this works. Page Titles, Meta Descriptions and Alt Descriptions are three essential steps to giving your site the best SEO possible.
Page Titles are the top line that will show up on your page preview on Google or other search engines. It is important that these titles include what the article is about and your company branding at a minimum so that your site can be recognized over multiple related searches. To a reader searching for the right content or website on a search engine, a well-written page title can make the difference of whether they click through to view your site or not.
Meta Descriptionis the little snippet of information about your web pages that will show up in searches below the url. It is extremely important that the keywords or terms that someone is searching for are in the meta description. If they aren’t then the site either wont come up, which will hurt your view-ability, or the search engine will grab a random snippet from your article that does contain what was searched for, which may or may not be helpful to the reader. Unhelpful or difficult to understand information is quickly dismissed by search engines that are constantly being updated to retrieve relevant information for their customers—web searchers.
Alt Descriptionsis the information displayed when the image won’t or can’t load on a device. It is also utilized by disabled people who surf the internet using reader devices. The image description provides further detail and works together with the image title to describe what is contained in an image so that it can effectively show up in searches for a similar image. This could lead to website clicks and views from people accessing the images on your site.
As far as SEO goes this is just the tip of the proverbial search engine iceberg. There are many more factors that go into good SEO practices. You can spend thousands of hours trying to figure it out and try to keep up, or you could just our team of web designers, developers and SEO specialists handle it for you while you tend to your customers. We can answer any questions you may have about your business and your current website SEO status and what steps can be taken to improve your websites’ online presence. We have been putting websites at the top of Google searches for a while now—let us get your business there too!