Not Using Social Media
Social media and SEO, while both very important for the success of a modern business, don’t appear as though they are especially linked. This is not the case however – using social media correctly can directly improve your search rankings.
While not using social media can be bad in its own right, as I discussed in my Getting Started With Social Media Guide, a recent study found that the more social media activity a site or page had, the higher it ranked in searches. The effect is incremental and small, but a successful post can have great effects, and this ranking improvement can accumulate into something significant.
Bad Image Tagging
This is a commonly overlooked problem, but it’s vital to properly tag images on your website. The two important tags to look out for are Title tags and Alt tags.
Alt tags are seen instead of the image on the page. That means if, for whatever reason, the image does not or cannot load, the text is shown instead. While some assume that alt tags are never seen, it is important to remember that many people do not see the images on your page. Security conscious people or those with slow internet may disable images from loading using scripts; but more important screen readers for the sight impaired use the alt tag to tell the user what they would otherwise be seeing, so it is important to always include your alt tags.
Title tags, on the other hand, are visible along with an image. Most common browsers will show the title tag text when you hover your mouse over the image. This tag is meant to be used to provide additional useful information about the image, or otherwise compliment it.
Both tags are important to SEO; so make sure you go through your website and all your pictures include alt and title tags. Remember – using the same keywords too much on a page can trigger alerts for search engine web crawlers and actually lower your ranking instead of increasing it, so be careful with your keywords.
That’s all for this time, friends. If you’re interested in improving your SEO contact us and we’d be happy to help.