One quick way to improve your search engine optimization is by ensuring that every image on your site has the appropriate alt and title attributes. Alt attributes, designed for helping visually impaired people better experience a Web site, provide a text-based alternative to an image. In other words, the alt attribute describes what the image is showing.

While the alt attributes aren't visible on the site, they are visible to search engine bots. Search engines see alt attributes as signs that your site is committed to usability, and tend to reward you with higher rankings.

Additionally, alt and title attributes offer an extra opportunity to include relevant keywords. This not only helps with universal search, but with more specialized searches, such as Google Image Search. For example, if your site sells sporting goods, you can use the alt attribute in a picture of a volleyball to note that it is a "white Wilson indoor volleyball." This means that a Web user searching for images of a "white volleyball" is more likely to end up on your site.

For extra credit, you can also add relevant keywords to the title attribute of links.

When determining what a site is about, search engines first scan the page's title and URL – two of the page's most important elements, as far as they're concerned. Page titles appear in the top left of your browser (as seen below) and tell the user what a particular page is about. 

The page title should be a succinct, unique phrase that summarizes what's on each particular page, so you should definitely resist the temptation to reuse the same page titles on multiple pages. Your page title should also include a relevant keyword that's 100 percent on target for the actual topic each page covers.

Surprisingly enough, page titles are an area that many companies get wrong, because they assume that their page title should start with their brand names. In fact, it's better to put the page topic, including highly competitive keywords, first in the title and to place branded, less competitive words (like your company name) toward the end.

Why? Because search-engine bots place more importance on the words that come at the beginning of your title tag than words that follow at the end. Use the space at the beginning of your page titles for your relevant keyword phrases, because chances are, your site is already performing well for your brand name.

In addition to unique page titles, it's also worth taking the time to create unique meta descriptions for each page. Search engines don't use information in the meta tag to determine your organic search rankings. However, they often display meta descriptions on search-engine result pages as the descriptive text underneath the primary hyperlinked headline. Add a sentence or two about what's on each page in the description attribute of the meta tag to entice searchers to click through to your page when it shows up in organic listings.

Most Web templates – and therefore most Web copywriters – treat heading tags as style elements. H1 is the biggest headline, H2 is the biggest subhead, H3 is a smaller subhead than H2 and so on. However, search bots don’t see things quite the same way. They see the content you put in header tags H1 through H6 as an indication of what's truly important on the page.

Search bots see the H1 tag as the site's most important heading and the content right beneath the H1 tag as the site's most important content. They weight the content in your H2 tag as being more important than what's in your H3 tag, and so on.

Many Web templates automatically designate the H1 tag as the page's main headline and the H2 tag as the subhead that immediately follows the H1 tag, resulting in Web copy that looks like this:

This default way of using tags often fills the H2 subhead, your second most important tag, with fluff rather than important, keyword-rich content. You're also losing out on an opportunity to tell the search engines more about your site with relevant content that occurs between the two tags. Use a style tag like the <STRONG> tag for your subhead instead and save your H2 tag for more important content:

Another thing to keep in mind is that your headings should literally be in order. In other words, your H1 tag should be at the top of the page, H2 below that, and so on. Make sure that your H5 tag doesn't appear in the page before your H2.

And, if you can, avoid repeating tags within the page. There should only be one H1 tag and one H2 tag. If your page template forces you to repeat tags, try to use the less important H3 through H6 tags as subheads instead of H2.

Unlike the HTML page that usually appears when someone clicks your site-map link, XML site maps tell search-engine bots which pages you consider to be the most important, how often you update the content and how often the bot should return to crawl your pages.

Some Web CMS systems, like Hot Banana from Lyris and many open-source applications, automatically create an XML sitemap. Unfortunately, many commercial offerings do not. If you fall into the latter category, ask your webmaster to manually create and submit an XML sitemap to the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Make sure that you update your site's pages as often as you indicate on your XML site map. If your site map says you update a particular page every hour, but you don't update it for a week, you're setting yourself up for issues with the search engines.

When you're ready for a quick win, making small changes to your site goes a long way. By employing appropriate alt attributes on your images and links, optimizing your page titles, creating a sound HTML structure and keeping the search bots informed via an XML site map, you'll be taking steps toward improving your search ranking, and ultimately, increasing your site traffic, generating more leads and getting more sales.

###
 

About the Author

Jeff Jones is a Web-optimization specialist at Lyris. He helps companies improve their Web sites, SEO results and PPC-campaign performance.

Related Resources:

• Subscribe to Inside Lyris HQ our monthly online-marketing newsletter.
• Download free online-marketing guides, tools and webinars in the Lyris Online-Marketing Resource Center.