7 SEO Strategies For Your Website Redesign
By now, pretty much everyone who has a website knows that search engine optimization (SEO) is important. Search engines account for the majority of website traffic and using SEO properly can help you ensure a solid return on your website efforts. There are a lot of factors involved in creating an SEO strategy that can help your new website rank higher in search results.
So—where do you start?
1. Target your keywords for best SEO.
The first step to any successful SEO strategy is to define the keywords which you want your website to rank for in search engines. Try to pick words based on relevance, traffic volume, and achievability. There are some great free tools to help you pick your keywords, and we suggest you try Free Wordtracker, and Google Adwords because they are feature-rich and not to complicated for beginners. If you want to learn more about targeting keywords take a look at one of our webinars on SEO.
Okay, so now you’ve chosen your keywords, what are the next essential elements to your SEO?
2. How to use title tags: SEO best practices.
Title tags tell search engines what your webpage is about. It is important that your title tags are descriptive of your webpage, use your keywords and follow a consistent format.
3. How to use header tags: SEO best practices
A heading is an H1, H2, or H3 tag which is placed within your website’s HTML and helps search engines: denote page structure, define which information on the page is most important, define what is in the content of each section on a page, and builds relevance for your keywords.
4. The importance of meta descriptions for SEO.
Meta descriptions set the blurb in the search engine results and act as a kind of “teaser” for your visitors. It’s best to keep the description to 155-160 characters and to put your keyword in and especially to make sure that it accurately describes the content of your page.
5. Image SEO: alt tag and title tag optimization.
An alt tag tells a search engine what your pictures are about. This is helpful for SEO and is important for the accessibility of your site. For your visitors with a disability or those that use screen readers, alt tags are an essential way for them to interact with the content on your page.
6. What’s the best keyword density SEO for better ranking?
Keyword density is the number of times a keyword occurs on the a webpage in proportion with the other words on the page. This is an important step in your SEO strategy because it helps you build relevance around your keywords, it re-affirms that what you say in your headings and title tags is actually what your page content is about. In general, it’s best to keep your keyword to about 2-7% of any given page’s content.
7. How to optimize your anchor text strategy for SEO.
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink and it tells search engines what the next page is about. This is an important way to improve your clickthrough rates (informing a user about what’s on the next page encourages confidence for them to click).
Website Redesigns: Improve Your SEO & Website ROI
We know it seems complicated, but SEO is an important way to ensure that your website redesign is successful. If you redesign your site but don’t put any SEO strategies to work, it is unlikely that you’ll see much of ROI for your website and don’t forget, one of the best ways to tell if your new SEO strategy is working, is to measure the results. Two free tools we recommend for this are Google Webmaster tools. If you want to learn more about how to measure the success of your SEO with Google Analytics take a look at our post on “Getting Started with Web Analytics.”
If you need help with your SEO and getting your website to rank higher for your keywords visit Marqui Management or call 888-384-9424 for more info.