Methods to Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Increasing the Visibility of Your Website in Search Results

Search engine optimization should be an important part of every business is marketing strategy. SEO can significantly improve the visibility of your website in Oregon (unpaid) search results, and therefore increase the number of people who visit your site.

SEO is all about improving the volume and quantity of organic traffic to a website.  SEO robots/crawlers look at the frontend of websites and index the content. They use links to get around a website. Google uses algorithms to pull results based on keywords and searches for search engine results page (SERPs).

Depending on your goals, SEO can be a complex and costly effort, but there are a few simple things that can be done in-house or with minimum investment to improve your rankings:

Content. Search engines use automated programs called crawlers to scan the content of each website and categorize it. Making sure your content is well-written, unique, and fresh content will therefore help rank your site higher in search results in addition to making it more engaging to visitors.

Meta tags. In addition, meta tags and keywords makes it easier for crawlers to scan your page, know what is on the page, and be able to index it to the search engine.

Keywords. Place appropriate keywords throughout your site: in your titles, content, URLs, and image names. When thinking about what keywords to use, consider what topics your site addresses and what words someone searching for information on those topics would use in a search query.

Focus on search phrases rather than single keywords. The two most important places to include keywords are the title tag, page header, and links. Search engines know that titles and links are more important than the neighboring text, so they give greater weight to the keywords found there.

SEO is not an instant one-shot process. As you add or change content to your site, so should you add or change meta tags, keywords and other SEO strategies. SEO methods are also always changing, so it is important to keep your site current and use the latest technologies and strategies to increase your visibility.

Here are extra SEO Do’s and Don’ts

Do’s                                                                                                         

Use location details. People often search with the city or state in their search phrases.

• Text sizes-Consider using H1, H2, bold. The larger the text is, the more importance Google places on the words.
• Always include meta data for multimedia. Google cannot tell what a picture is of, so it relies on meta data to tell them what is in the picture.
• Keep your data up-to-date, original, and fresh.

Don’t

• Do not use an excess amount of images. Images take a lot longer to load and can decrease your site’s load time.
• Avoid black hat techniques and hidden content- Google doesn’t take kindly to these activities and have been known to block sites from page ranking for activities such as these.
• Use Flash, Frames Ajax, or Java script

If you're interested in learning more about Integrated IDX, SEO functionality, we encourage you to contact us today!