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WiscWeb - SEO tips for Google
What is SEO?
'SEO' is an acronym for "search engine optimization." SEO involves making strategic updates to your website to improve its discoverability. These changes can be as simple as updating the text used within a webpage or as complicated as paying for better search ranking.
SEO is crucial for increasing your website's visibility on search engines like Google. A well-optimized website can attract more organic traffic, improve rankings, and ultimately enhance your online presence.
Simple tips
Include keywords on your page
Ensure that your page titles, headings, excerpts, and body text includes relevant keywords about the topic.
- Identify relevant keywords related to your business or content.
- Choose a mix of keywords that align with your content and target audience.
- Place target keywords strategically in page titles, meta descriptions (excerpts), and header tags (H1, H2, H3).
- Example: Most people use the term “graduation” but many campus websites refer to this as “commencement.”
Create quality content
Write high-quality, relevant, and valuable content that addresses the needs of your target audience.
- Use proper formatting (bullet points, subheadings) to improve readability.
- Regularly update and refresh your content to show search engines that your site is active.
Double-check your page excerpts/meta descriptions
Excerpts, or meta descriptions, are a short summary of what the page is about. These are auto-generated in WiscWeb unless you manually set them yourselves.
Tip: Here’s how to find and set your page excerpts: WiscWeb - Finding and editing the excerpt of a page
- It is a good idea to write excerpts from scratch. Consider what you’d want to appear as a description in Google results.
- Creating compelling and unique excerpts will entice users to click on your link in search results.
Use headings properly
Headings are important for accessibility and readability of your content, but they may also impact SEO. They should not be used to style content, but rather to lay out and provide hierarchy to content on the page.
Examples of misuse:
- Don’t use a particular heading just because you like the size and weight of it.
- Don’t use multiple h1s on your page (there should only be one h1 and that is set by the page title).
Use alt text on all images, where appropriate
Alt text provides helpful information to users navigating the site using a screen reader. We highly recommend adding these to your images, where appropriate.
Note: Some images are just decorative and should be denoted as such.
Tip: Here’s how you can add alt text in WiscWeb: WiscWeb - Using Alternative (Alt) Text
- Optimize image alt text with descriptive keywords for better image search visibility.
- There are several tools available for teaching how to craft better alt text
Use simple, concise language
Users don’t want to have to slog through a bunch of text to get to the answer to their question or to find the link they need. Make it easy for them.
- Use language that is easy to understand and avoid adding loads of text where a few sentences might do.
- Consider coursework in writing in plain language.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are XML files which list the various URLs that exist on your site (along with some other information). They allow search engines like Google to more easily crawl your site and find all the pages that exist. Consider them like a map - you may be able to find your way without one, but having one makes things a little easier and faster.
Why is this important? Well, if Google can’t find all the pages to your site, it certainly can’t place them in search results!
In WordPress, sitemaps are automatically generated for your site. The URLs for the sitemaps can then be linked to a Google Search Console account so that you may encourage Google to crawl your site more regularly.
Google SEO starter guide
If you are interested in digging in further, Google has outlined all of the things they suggest for improving SEO ranking with their search engine.
This information is located in their Google SEO Starter Guide.