6 Basic SEO Tips to Refresh Your Website

Getting found online is crucial to the success of your business. That’s where search engine optimization - or SEO - comes into play. SEO is a set of strategies to increase the quality and quantity of traffic directed to your website. SEO works to help search engines understand the content on your site so that they can direct users who are searching for the types of goods or services you provide.

SEO can sound daunting at first, but when you cut through the jargon you’ll find that it is really intuitive. It’s all about giving search engines as many clues as possible as to what your site is about. The good news is there are several basic SEO strategies that you can enact easily on your website to improve your search ranking. No technical experience necessary! Use these 6 basic SEO tips to refresh your website today.

1. Install an SEO Plugin

If you have a WordPress site, we highly recommend installing the Yoast SEO plugin. The free version has great capabilities and you don’t often need to upgrade to see the results you are looking for. We love Yoast for two reasons: 1) It helps you analyze the SEO on each page and uses an easy color-coded system to alert you when you may need to make SEO improvements, and 2) It makes basic SEO like adding meta descriptions and changing SEO page titles a breeze (more on that below).

Yoast has a ton of user guides and tutorials too, so it is a very user-friendly and low-tech option. If you use another site like Wix or Squarespace, they often have SEO tools built into their platforms too.

2. Keyword-rich Text

At its core, SEO is all about keywords. Using the right keywords on your site will help search engines understand what your site is about. The important step here is to put yourself in your customers' shoes and think about what words or phrases they would search to find the type of good or service that you provide. A great way to explore keywords is to do searches yourself using the words you think are important, and assess the results that come up. Check out your competitors to see the type of words they are using. These keywords will be used throughout your whole site within titles, images names, and body text.

3. Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are snippets that describe the content of a webpage. They are short, about 150 characters, and are the text that shows up in search results for a specific page. With a plugin like Yoast, you can directly edit the meta description for each page. Yoast also allows you to add focus keywords for each page so that it can assess if your meta description touches on the keywords that are important.

4. Titles Tags

SEO works in a hierarchy, and search engines weigh some text more heavily than others. This is where titles come into play. Each page on your site has a meta title tag, which is the title that will appear in search results and is also the name that will appear on a web browser.

Title tags should be 60 characters or less, and it's critical to make each page title tag unique. A general rule of thumb can be to use {Product Name } {Brand Name} - {Location}, but it will vary for each business. Title tags are an important place to add keywords and avoid generic page names like “Home”, “About Us”, “Services”, etc. since these words don’t give any specifics about what your business is. You can edit your title tags in the Yoast section of each page. Pay close attention to the titles you give to your page names such as blog posts as well, and opt for straight-forward titles with keywords over something catchy or creative.

5. Alt Text + Image Names

Alt text is another SEO term that may seem overly technical, but it’s really quite simple! Alt text is essentially a written description of an image. Since search engines can’t “read” images, Alt text is how they can identify what an image is about. This is especially important if you have an image-heavy site like a photography website or travel blog, but it is a best practice for all sites to add alt text to their images. Another tip is to name your images to give more clues to search engines. Instead of “img343.png”, opt for “gluten-free-pasta.png”. Your alt text might say “gluten free pasta recipe with spinach, artichoke, and tomato”.

6. Ongoing Updates

With all of the SEO tips we have discussed, the last one is perhaps the most important. SEO is not something that you set and forget, it is an ongoing strategy that needs to be updated and maintained over time. Once you get the basics down and complete the steps above for all of your existing content, your SEO will be largely maintenance and you can easily add it into your regular website update processes.

Have any more SEO questions? Leave us a comment below!