1. Choose a search friendly URL.
Before you go live with your small business website, you need to choose a URL, which is what visitors will type into the search bar to find your website. In a way, a URL is similar to a storefront window for a brick-and-mortar business as it’s one of the first things that people will see when they visit your website. Your URL is also the first place that search engines like Google will look to determine the relevancy of your business in search results. With so much riding on your URL, you need to make sure that it’s representative of your business.
As a best practice, your URL should be your business name and possibly a relevant keyword. Your customers should be able to see your URL and recognize your business. The shorter and more concise your URL is, the better.
2. Assign titles and descriptions to each page on your website.
Have you ever hovered over a tab on your browser and noticed a brief phrase pop up under your mouse? This means that a title has been assigned to the page, which is very helpful to search engines when determining how to rank content.
Assigning a title and description to each page on your website will also appear in SERPs for web surfers to read so they can learn what your website entails.
3. Use anchor text to your advantage.
As you create content for your website, keep in mind where you’ll want to use anchor text. Anchor text is a hyperlink within the text that visitors can click on to be taken to another page on your website. When done well, anchor text should improve navigation on your website by linking visitors to relevant content.
Anchor text can also signal to search engines what your content is about, but it’s important that you don’t abuse it.
4. Ensure all images on your website use alt text.
While search engines can read the text on your website, they don’t know how to determine the meaning behind images. To tell search engines what your images are, you can add alt text to each image on your website. Alt text provides search engines with a few descriptive words about the image. When creating alt text for images, include your business name or a keyword that is relevant to your industry.
5. Use headers to give your website design structure.
Help search engines to better understand the content on your website by using headers to provide a text hierarchy. The title should be the most relevant part of your page and be descriptive of what the content entails. Using subtitles to break up the text and make it easier to digest is beneficial to both visitors and search engines.
If you want to improve your company’s existing website design in 2018 or start from scratch with a new website, taking into account these five best practices will help to ensure that you have a search-friendly website.
Contact us at New York Ave learn how we can help you optimize your website design in the new year to increase awareness and generate more revenue.
