SEO Matters!

Every piece of content you create should be developed with SEO – search engine optimization – in mind. SEO matters if you want your website and its content to be found by people online. Why else would you have a website!

SEO is less of a moving target than in years past, so now is a good time to commit to the three elements that will make your content pop in search engines.

Use SEO Words and Keywords

Your words get the attention of search engines. Write your content with keywords and phrases. Make sure to put keywords everywhere that makes sense: titles, heads, subheads, captions, and paragraph text.

Focus on Links

Create connections – links – to related content at your site. Called “internal links” these signal to search engines that pieces of content at your site are important. The more links, the more important!

Also create links to related content and sites that help to build your message and brand. These are called “external links.” Use keywords for link text whenever it makes sense.

A word of caution – don’t create too many links. Also, don’t create “link farms” – pages that are mostly just lists of links. This detracts from the usability of your site and reduces SEO.

Structure Pages and Posts for SEO

Pay attention to proper HTML structure for each web page. Use header tags (H1, H2, etc.). Populate the meta title and description tags that are used for search engine result pages. Also, populate alt tags on images and other non-text elements of the page.  As always, use keywords as appropriate.

Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

Another structural must do: your site must be mobile friendly. In this case, SEO matters so much that your site may be completely invisible online.

Search engines will downgrade or – worse – not show – a website that is not optimized for mobile devices. To ensure you will be seen, your website must be mobile-friendly.