For years Google has kept website administrators and marketers on their toes, as they have unleashed periodical algorithm changes. While some of the larger algorithm updates have forced some businesses to engage in complex site restructuring, there are a few simple tried and true steps you can take to increase your search engine results. Though it can be a frustrating process, with a little effort and some strategizing, you can change how you approach content creation on your site, leading to improved search engine results. In this blog post we will discuss several key elements of basic on-page search engine optimization.

Optimize Your Site Page Around One Keyword or Topic

For years, businesses would stuff their site’s pages with keywords, resulting in an abundance of generic, uninspired content: those days are over. However, it still helps to keep your site pages optimized around one main idea and keyword. Ideally, keywords should appear in the page title, heading, image alt text, and throughout the page copy, but you should still be sure to craft each of these items for humans, not search engines.

Optimize Page Titles

For years now, title pages have been thought of as one of the most important on-page SEO elements. Title pages appear in three key places: browsers, search engine results pages, and external websites.

If your title tags are longer than 60 characters, search engines will shorten the titles for you, often displaying half completed titles.  50-55 characters seem to be the sweet spot for title tags. While a 50-55 character title tag will not guarantee that it won’t be truncated in the search engine results pages, you will at least have more control over how you are represented.

Title tags also present an opportunity to organize pages by keywords, leading to a more organized site.

Make Sure Each Image Has Optimized Alt-Text

Sometimes images do not render properly in the browser, and in these cases, the alt text is shown in place of the images, offering valuable context to what the images depict.

Search engines do not have the ability to see images on websites. Even if an image has text embedded within it, search engines are unable to crawl that text.

So by adding keywords in the image alt text and file name, you give search engines more opportunities to link to your website and your images can rank in Google’s Image Search.

Increase Page Speed | Cater To Mobile Search

Your page should load within two seconds, otherwise there is a good chance that the visitor will continue his or her search elsewhere. Page speed is a key component of retaining page visitors, and there are a variety of tools available to help you gauge your page loading times.

The speed of your site also makes a significant difference for mobile users. When mobile devices connect to a website, they typically use a slower connection than you are accustomed to with a desktop or laptop.

Your site should not only be readable and accessible from every device, but it should also be optimized for each. For example, content and included images need to appear lighter on smaller devices. If your site delivers a bad user experience due to poor optimization, your ranking will be negatively impacted.

The lesson is simple: you should make sure that your site load time is optimized to make it as fast as possible. If you are not sure how fast your site is, you can test individual website page load speed with this great resource from Google.

ImageWorks, LLC | CT Search Engine Optimization

While professional SEO services can offer many opportunities to your business, you should never depend on SEO alone for the growth of your business. The companies that thrive on the online world have a comprehensive approach and utilize both online and offline marketing strategies. SEO can be a big piece; however, it is only one slice of the marketing pie.

By integrating all of today's Web tools such as SEO, social media, pay per click, and blogs, ImageWorks, LLC can turn your site into a lead generation tool.