Search engine optimization isn’t easy or fast. Great SEO can take a lot of time to implement, and effort is necessary to keep your website optimized with updated and relevant content.
But not everything about SEO is complicated or takes a lot of time to do. Here are some simple SEO tricks that you can very quickly use to help give your web pages and blog posts a boost:
1. Name your image files something meaningful.
Before you upload images to your website, take a second to check the file name. Often, the names of image files are a series of random letters and numbers, like “824XB7BXYU,” or if they come off of your camera, the date that you took the photo on, plus an additional number, like “20151030_085032.” For the sake of SEO, it’s a good idea to rename these images before you upload them to your website, as these file names will appear in your website code. Instead of random numbers and letter, give your image files names that are also keyword phrases relevant to the page and the image you are uploading.
2. Add alt-text to images.
After you’ve changed the file name and uploaded the photo, there’s one more SEO step to take before publishing the photo. If you’re using a WordPress site (like a WebDVM site), you will see a box like this when inserting a photo:
On the right hand side, there is an opportunity to write in alt-text for your image. The purpose of alt-text is to replace an image. Search engine crawlers can’t see images, so they rely on alt-text to understand what the picture is. Alt-text is also the text that users see when the picture fails to load, or when your site is being accessed by someone with a screen reader. So not only does alt-text have benefits for SEO, but it’s also important for accessibility purposes.
When writing alt-text, you don’t necessarily want to make it too keyword heavy. Just use the alt-text to clearly describe what the picture depicts. However, if you’re using pictures that are directly relevant to the content of your page (e.g., pictures of your veterinarians for your team page), then your alt-text will likely have SEO benefits as well.
3. Link internally.
A really simple SEO trick to keep your readers on your site and help them navigate to the information they’re looking for is to link to other pages on your site. Have your blog posts link to other blog posts or to your book an appointment page. Your Services page should link to each of your individual services, and your About Us page should include a hyperlink to your team page. It only takes a little bit of creative thinking and a couple of seconds to include a few hyperlinks in your content to other pages on your website, but it can make all the difference.
4. Make good use of anchor text.
When you’re linking internally, what kinds of phrases are you using for your hyperlink text? (If you’re uncertain about what hyperlink text is, it’s the text that you click on to go to another page. It’s often blue like this sentence.) If you’re using phrases like “click here” for your hyperlinks, you’re missing a valuable SEO opportunity. Instead, create a hyperlink using the name of the page you’re linking to or a relevant keyword phrase related to the content on that page. The goal of great hyperlink text is to tell the reader, and the search engines, what the page you’re linking to is about.
5. Add social sharing buttons to your site.
When people link back to your content from other sites, that tells the search engines that your website has valuable content that people want to read and share. And social sharing buttons can help encourage people to share your content across the web. Install social sharing buttons on your practice blog to make it easy for your followers to instantly share your content.
6. Include keywords in headings.
Search engines rank headings more highly than they rank paragraph text. So when you’re writing content, don’t forget that adding heading text with important keywords can help improve your SEO ranking. If you’re using WordPress, you can easily add headings in the text toolbar. The higher the heading ranking, the higher the search engines rank it, so a Heading 1 will have more weight than a lower heading.
7. Check if your website is mobile-friendly.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it will affect your ranking in mobile search results on Google. If you have a WebDVM4 website, good news! Your site is mobile-friendly! But if you want to check with Google, or if you don’t have one of our websites, you can make sure your website is mobile-friendly in seconds with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
8. Keep your site updated.
Every time you add new content to your website or update the existing content, search engines make a note of that change. Regularly updating your content is good for your SEO because it tells the search engine crawlers that yours is a website that is constantly being populated with fresh new content. Blog writing is an excellent and important way to keep your site updated, but it’s not the kind of thing you can do in under 5 minutes.
A faster trick for updating your website is to upload your holiday hours and to remove the changed hours when the holidays are over. This is a quick and easy way to give your website content a quick update, and your clients will appreciate the information too!
9. Claim your Google My Business Listing.
When you search for local businesses on Google, some of the results will be local listings that connect you with Google Maps. You can easily ensure that your clinic shows up in these local listings by creating a Google My Business account.
You may not be able to do them all at once, but when you have 5 minutes to spare, try one or two of these SEO tricks to give your site a little boost and improve your search engine rankings!
No time for SEO? Talk to us about how we can help you optimize your site with a WebDVM website!!
