Non-SEO URLs

SEO URLs are a very important piece of on-page SEO. An “SEO URL” means a URL that you can look at and clearly see the meaning of the page. Instead of having something like “foodmart.com/item21121″ it would be along the lines of “foodmart.com/gourmet-foods” to be considered an SEO URL.

If your URL is improperly named it makes it much more difficult for search engines to see the meaning or purpose of the page. For example, if you sell dog toys online and you have a page for “dog beds” and the search engines see the following 2 URLs, which one do you think they can understand the purpose of the page more efficiently?

superdogs.com/products/product13/infoprod13

superdogs.com/products/dog-beds/fancy-dog-bed

Making your URLs this way is a huge help convincing the search engines you should rank high. Make sure that you do not mislead them though with the names you choose for your URLs. If your website is about dog beds don’t make the URL about diamond jewelry. This is pretty close to common sense but people do a lot of crazy things in SEO to attempt to “trick” the search engines.

Alt Tags

Using alt tags on every image can give you a nice search engine score bump. Alt tags are the “alternate” text attached to an image. They are generally used for non-image enabled browsing and blind or vision impaired users. Not only does using alt tags increase accessibility for vision impaired users but it helps search engines know what your images are. If you have alt tags on your images your search engines scores will increase because they have no way to know what your images are about without them. This is a great place to add some keywords, just make sure they are relevant and appropriate to the image. The alt tag is also how images are indexed into Google images (http://images.google.com)  and other image searches so you can pick up some great and easy traffic on the image search pages by adding alt tags.

Proper Image Names

Very similar in importance to alt tags is proper image names. If your images are just named something like “image1.jpg, image2.jpg, image3.jpg” search engines have no way of knowing that your images match the theme of your website and can’t raise your ranking. If you’re selling a red corvette instead of having an image name such as “image343.jpg” name the image “1998-red-corvette-for-sale.jpg.” This will give you a search engine boost and also help increase your visibility in the image search engines we talked about in the alt tags section. Giving the search engines every reason to trust your websites content and images will ensure that your on-page SEO is as good as possible.

Whether creating a new website or editing a current website always add relevant URL names and give all of your images proper names and alt tags. These are great things to keep in mind if you haven’t started building your website yet, and if you already have a website give it an on-page optimization audit after reading this series. You will be surprised how many little things you can change to get bumped in the search engines quickly with fairly minimal effort.