Rainman’s Senior Web Developer, Austin Stewart, gives us 5 must haves for good SEO on your small business site. Implementing Austin’s top 5 list on your own site will help your site’s search engine ranking and help your company Get Found on Google!
1. Label images
- Search engines aren’t smart enough to read images. Search engines only read the filename unless given something different.
- Use the alt attribute whenever you can on <img> tags to describe them as text. For example, Logo.png will then be read as Rainman Web Development Logo.
- Rename the image file to something obvious if at all possible. For example, Logo.png can be renamed to rainman-logo.png
2. Sitemap and Submission to Search Engines
- Site submission and sitemaps are optional things to help search engines see your site faster. They will automatically crawl your site every few months but this way helps move things along, especially after a big change like a new website.
- Visit a sitemap generator such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and submit your website’s domain and let the search engines crawl each page of your new website. It will then generate a sitemap file that you will upload to your site’s FTP
- Site submission happens through a search engine’s webmaster tools. The main search engines that you should submit to are Google and Bing (Yahoo uses Bing’s search engine). Use site submission if you have a brand new site and domain, you are replacing an outdated site with a current site, or you make major changes to the structure and/or copy of the site.
3. Separate Meta Keywords and Description for each page
- Meta keywords and descriptions run in the background of every site page and help focus search results.
- Keywords should be limited to 10 words or less for each page
- Descriptions should be short and less than 160 characters
4. Use of headline structure
- heading structure is simple and seen on every website. The tags number by size h1-h6, h1 being the largest.
- Structure should always follow: H1: title of page, H2: sub-category of page, and H3: sub-sub-category of each page, etc
5. Use Descriptive Links
- All links on your website should be descriptive, both for internal and external purposes.
- Do not use “Click Here to get a Quote”, instead use “Click Here to Get a Website Design Quote”
Making use of Austin’s top 5 SEO must haves will not only increase your site’s search engine rankings, but help your site bring in more business on the web. Still not sure about SEO? Give us a call at 830.331.9995 or email us at sales@rainman.com and we’ll help you along the SEO journey. Maximizing sites for SEO is one of our Rainman’s top priorities.
-Austin Stewart, Developer at Rainman.com and Amanda Koone, Director of Operations at Rainman.com
Tags: Content Marketing, Google, Independent Insurance Agents, Rainman, small business, Web Design, Websites
