This week we continue with Part 2 of our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices. In Part 1, we listed 3 best practices to increase your site’s exposure on search engines: connect your domain, actively share your site on other websites, complete page descriptions and meta tags. In this article, we share with you 4 additional tips to improve your search rankings.
4. Write a descriptive title.
The title is the text that shows up in the title bar in the viewer’s browser. This is like the front door of your page. Make it attractive! “Johnny’s Bakery – Freshly Baked Everyday in San Francisco” is much better than “Johnny’s Shop.”
5. Add keywords to your headings.
Headings are the big text boxes that are located throughout your site. Titles are important for SEO because search engines give additional weight to heading text. So, it’s better to add descriptive text in the headings. For instance, “About Johnny’s Bakery” is better than “About” as a heading for your “About” section.
6. Add descriptions to all the images.
Since search engines don’t understand images, they look for image descriptions. An image description will help search engines index your image, which helps index your site. These are the same as adding “alt” tags in HTML.
Note: Try to keep your image sizes under 200KB. The best size for website images (desktop and laptop) is around 50KB. This will improve performance and experience! The image quality is best if you compress it on your computer, prior to upload.
7. Send Google a sitemap.
Verifying your site with Google’s Webmaster Tools give you access to all kinds of cool stuff, and lets you submit a sitemap to improve your SEO. For Strikingly users, this is only available for Pro users using a custom domain or subdomain. If you are a Limited or Free user, don’t worry! Your Google indexing is improved by Strikingly’s URL structure, “page.strikingly.com”.
This is Part 2 of this series – get back to Part 1 here.
