Everybody wants their website to be the first search result to pop up on Google. Obviously, that’s not realistic for a lot of businesses — there’s only one top result, after all. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to be as close to the top as possible. In order to do that, you need to make your website as attractive to Google’s web crawlers as you can. This is called search engine optimization, or SEO.
Some SEO measures are impossible to achieve without a high level of technological savvy, but don’t despair! There are ways to make your website appealing to Google’s (and Bing’s and Yahoo!’s for that matter) search algorithms that don’t require a degree in computer science.
- Use hyperlinks
This one is pretty basic, and takes almost no time at all to implement. If you’re publishing a blog post, or updating a page on your website, be sure to include links. It’s important to not get too crazy — one link per 100 words is a good rule of thumb — otherwise you’ll get penalized in search rankings.
- Title your links and images
When inserting a link or image, a window will appear with various fields. One that you may have seen is “title.” The title is the text that shows up when the cursor is hovering over a link or image for a few seconds. Titling links and images is a good place to add keywords to your website that Google likes to see. If you’re not doing this, you’re missing out on an opportunity to improve your search rank.
- Use alt text on images
Like titles, alt text is a field you may have seen when uploading an image to your website. What is alt text? Back in the early days of the consumer Internet, when most people were using dial-up modems to get online, it wasn’t unusual for people to disable image downloading on their browsers. Images that take a second to download now might have taken several minutes or hours (depending on the speed of the connection) in the late 90s. When they did this, the alt text would display instead of the image. Google still uses this, particularly when it comes to ranking images on Google Image Search.
There you have it — three simple ways to improve your website’s SEO without having to be a computer programmer or spending endless hours doing so.