If your website is properly designed and developed then you should be able to gain rewarding rankings in Google search, and other search engines. There are over 200 factors that drive how companies appear in search. We will focus on some of the core issues within this article. Many of these items can be easily addressed yourself.
There are many factors that dictate where your search ranking stands, some are not within your control. This article discusses many important factors that are.
SEO means Search Engine Optimization. If you want your website to appear higher in search results, this field of study is important to know. You don’t need a degree, but understanding the basics can go a long way.
You can measure the performance of your website by using sites like GTMetrix.com. Sites like this reveal how well your site conforms to defined standards. It will effectively point out where work needs to be done.
In this article we will explore both the internal and external website factors that can drive your search ranking higher.

Internal Website SEO Factors

Image Optimization

Google cares deeply about delivering answers to seekers in the shortest amount of time. If your web images are over-sized and uncompressed, then they are delivering much more data to the searcher than what is required. These factors will directly impact your website rendering speed, and your search ranking (in addition to the user experience).
Website images should always be “cut to the appropriate size”. What does this mean? It means that if your web image uses half of the width of your site, then it should not exceed 600-800 pixels wide. Images directly from your phone could be 4000-6000 pixels wide, which should never be used as they are. They often are megabytes in terms of file size.
Those photos should be edited using a paint program to significantly their reduce the size. There are also site plugins that can help with this, such as Imagify, found here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/imagify.
Further, reducing photo images sizes are not enough. You should also compress the images to ensure that their sizes are as small as possible. Reducing your images sizes, and compression rates, will dramatically increase the speed in which your site renders. This will also directly affect your search ranking. Image compression is a feature offered by most of the paint programs.
image reduction chart

ALT Tags

What is an ALT tag? It is a brief test description of the photo primarily used for screen readers by people with blindness. If a web visitor is using a screen reader, then the site will provide that short text description as they are unable to visually see the image. Google and others place much weigh on the proper use of ALT tags, and it will affect your SEO if not done properly.
When and where are ALT tags placed? ALT tags are added to images when they are uploaded into your website. You will see a field for the image title. In that same area will be a field for the ALT tag. (Show image example). GOT
ALT tags should contain brief and accurate descriptions of the images that they are paired with. You don’t want to use this field for adding unrelated keywords. It serves a purpose and should be used in the manner intended. Not doing so could affect your ranking.
There are a various ways to address these issues:
  1. Visit your site and use the View Source browser option to see the code version. Then, search for alt=. The result will display what follows alt=, which should be your text description. If it’s blank, it needs to be fixed. This should be done for each page. AI engines can help here as well.
  2. If you are using WordPress, then you can visit the Media Library and review each image for its ALT text. They can be added or edited here.
We often see websites containing no ALT tags at all.
alt text lesson

HTML Formatting

The HTML formatting of your website can also play a big role in how your website is ranked. There are well defined rules for supporting what the search engines want in terms of formatting.
In general, your largest page title is at the top of the page. It is often followed by a smaller sub-title. Then, the page section titles appear smaller as the page scrolls down.
The top title in this case would be designated as H1 text (the largest). The sub-title would have an H2 designation, then H3 etc. This formatting allows the search engines to properly understand how your content is organized, hence reflect in your listings in search.
It is not enough to make a title a larger font size, it needs to have an HTML designation as well. After applying the proper HTML tags, the affected text should automatically increase in size. Those default font sizes for titles can be over-ridden to obtain the desired size.
Not using these basic guidelines will adversely affect your search ranking. To learn about HTML basic, click on this link: W3 Schools
We see websites with no HTML title designations at all.

html titles

CMS Choice

CMS stands for Content Management System. This the framework that contains your website files and photos. There are simple CMS platforms, moderate ones, and ones used for large web deployments and custom coding. We primarily use WordPress here at Wicked Design. More on this later in the article. However, there are many to choose from these days.
The self-help sites make it easy to begin building websites, and often have a low cost entry point. Platforms like Square, Wix, Weebly and others offer  beginners a way to build their own sites.  These platforms help to reinforce the guidelines presented in this article, but your website factors should be checked regardless. These CMS products are proprietary and are limited in terms of exporting your site and adding tech into it.

These sites may not help in pushing your rankings to where you want them. Moderate CMS platforms, such as WordPress and Drupal, allow for a wide range of customization and the ability to add in technology.
While these have a higher learning curve, you have much more control of adjusting factors to boost SEO. Because both of these solutions are open source (unlike the aforementioned options) you have a great deal of freedom to do as you wish. This not only includes improving SEO, but also the site’s performance.
If search ranking is critical to your business, then choosing the right platform is important.

Text Content

Aside from the technical information presented in this article, content itself is also critical. You can’t rank in search for words that don’t appear with your website.
We’ve had clients complain that they are not appearing in search for phrases like: “Best Builder”, or “Cute Handbags”. Our first question in reply is “Does that text appear with your site”?
The keywords and phrases that you want to appear in search must be in your site’s written text. The most critical terms should be prominent in your writing, but not overdone.
Before starting your website, we suggest writing down your top ten or twenty keywords and phrases. Then, weave this into the page content.
Each page within your website should present at least two or three paragraphs of text.
If your are here in Loudoun County, like we are, then you can use localized words as a competitor edge. As an example: Blueridge, wine country, Shenandoah.

Geographic Phrases

If your website is meant to target a local audience, then including nearby towns and counties within your site can help your search ranking. As a small business owner, you likely can’t compete nationally for search ranking of general products or services (unless you are in a niche). That’s why it makes sense to include local town names that you serve.
You can weave these terms into the writing of your site, and/or place them in the footer area at the bottom. We use these same suggestions on our own website.

Meta Titles / Descriptions and Schema

This section is more technical, but can be really effective. Depending on the CMS and theme that you may use, there can be SEO fields called Page Title and Page Description. There are also plugins available that afford these fields if not found natively.
These fields can contain summarized versions of the pages they represent. Completing these fields go a long way in helping your SEO and ranking status.
Each page with your website may have these fields available. Therefore, the SEO section within each page should be completed.
To maximize your website strategy, you should also embed a website Schema. Because writing a schema can be a technical exercise, we’ll refer you to think link to get started. https://schema.org. WordPress users can find related plugins here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/search/Schema/

Website Performance

The speed in which your website operates is another critical SEO parameter. Many factors influence the speed of your website including way-large images, too much or junk code, too many plugins, a slow web server/host, outdated software, running older versions of host software (e.g. PHP), caching, and more.
Many of these factors are in your control. But managing them requires some technical knowledge. Finding information to help boost your site speed is widely available and east to find. Here is one such site in particular: https://blog.hubspot.com/website/how-to-optimize-website-speed. This thorough article also mentioned sites where you can test for performance.

External Website Factors

Current Rankings

You can’t know if your website rankings are improving unless you measure where you are today. This means that you’ll need to create a baseline for where your website appears in search. I suggest that you choose ten to twenty keywords and phrases that your potential customers will be entering into search. Create a spreadsheet and list each of those. The rows at the top should be dates.
While logged out (of Google), use Google to search for those phrases while adding local town names. The mark which page of results that you domain name is appearing. If on page one of results, then mark that down. Repeat this process for the other terms and town combinations. Then try this exercise a week layer to compare results. Rankings continually change over time.
When you have this research data, it will show where your ranking strengths and weaknesses are. You can work on improving your weakness by adding more like words to pages and posts.

Google Business Profile

An important factor is to keep your Google Business profile updated and accurate. Ensure that you have completed as much information as possible, including photos, hours, services and more. This is a free and powerful tool.

Backlinks

Backlinks are live links to your website from other websites. In general, the more of these that you have, the better your ranking could be. However, these backlinks should stem from websites that have “authority”. You wants backlinks from actual websites and not junk directories.

There are several sites that will display your backlinks. Just perform a simple search for these and you will find them.

Hosting

There are many types of web hosting available to consumers these day. In general, a faster web host can improve your SEO factors. The least expensive options for consumers today is called Shared Hosting. While this option is lower cost, it may also be the slowest in terms of speed. This is because you are sharing host component with other folks. You may be sharing storage, CPU, and IO with others.

Wicked Design Hosting uses what’s called a VPS host. This option can elegantly scale up as demand grows while delivering blistering speeds. This is not a low cost option, however. Therefor you need to evaluate speed over cost.

Analytics

Google and other create tools that allow you to review your web traffic patterns. Tools like Google Analytics, and the related Search Console, are incredible free tools that help you root out ranking issues and to understand your positioning.

Conclusion

You have all of the tools necessary to improve your SEO rankings for your website. It does take time and patience to make improvements. But over time these strategies do work. But you won’t see the overnight.

Let us know if you’d like help with any of the items mentioned in this article. We’ll be glad to help you and your business.