If you are planning to build a website for your business, one of the most important things you must focus on should be the SEO aspect of the site. Until and unless you optimize your website for the search engines, no amount of good content will be able to attract visitors to it. Below, we look at five often overlooked SEO basics that you should definitely implement when building your website.
Internal Links
Make sure that you use internal links on your website. Not only will it help search engines like Google crawl through your website, but it can also improve your rankings for certain keywords. In addition, you can also provide the reader with an option to read further about a specific topic, which eventually will increase your website exposure to visitors.
Image Tags
Many websites never add a text description of their images through the ‘alt’ option. This is a bad habit. Adding in the alt description will allow search engines to easily index your images, which increases the possibility that your images will appear at the top of search engine results.
URL Structure
Check out the structure of the webpage URLs and make sure that they do make sense. For example, suppose that you own a website with a domain x123.com. Now, if you publish an article with a heading ‘why you should buy an iPhone’, then the URL of the webpage should ideally look like ‘x123.com/why-you-should-buy-iphone’ or something similar. Unfortunately, many websites are set up in such a way that the URL tends to look like ‘x123.com/1per3456DT687’ and so on. This is not preferable since the URL will not make any sense when a person sees it.
Schema Markup
Remember to add schema markup to your website. By doing so, you can present your website in a more attractive way in the search engine results page. Without schema markup, your webpage will only appear as text content in the results. In contrast, once you add schema markup, the same page will be displayed with images, ratings, and so on. This not only makes the webpage result look more attractive but also increases the possibility that the user who sees the results clicks through it and visits the website.
Flash Usage
Flash was highly influential in the early 2000s because of the fact that it was the only way to add cool effects to web pages. However, adding flash to your websites now is a strict no-no since it can adversely affect the SEO of your website. As a rule of thumb, never put any flash animation in your text or navigations. And certainly, don’t build your website entirely in flash. You can use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build some cool looking websites without resorting to flash. So, look into those options to add effects to your web pages.
And if you are looking for a good SEO Company to help optimize your website, consider consulting Rank Envy, who is known to help businesses get top positions in search engine rankings.