Houston, TX – How to start competing online in a competitive market p5

This series picks back up on how to start and compete in a competitive market. As a quick recap:

Part 1 was about: Know who your competition is.

Part 2 was about: Research the details of your competition.

Part 3 was about: Establish your keyword list.

Part 4 was about: Build out your website and make sure it’s valuable.

We are building on those ideas. Here is the next main idea.

Part 5 is about knowing the setting up your onsite SEO.

If you have ever looked at the DA of a website you know that the Domain Authority score of a website is not a perfect way to tell website validity but a good way to know if you are moving forward or not.

I have a client who has over 4,000 articles on her site that she or her staff has written. All content is original and lengthy. This site has a DA of 39 at the time of this writing.

A friend of mine who owns a marketing agency has a DA of 36 and he has been in the business just as long as the one with 4,000 articles. My friend rarely posts anything new on his site but he does have about 20 pages on the same with good content on them.

How is this happening?

The answer is knowing how to make your site Search Engine Optimization friendly. Also known simply as SEO.

Each page has a few unique characteristics that are needed for proper SEO.

• Title Tags
• Headers
• Alt Text and Image Captions

Here is the breakdown

Title Tags

When you do a Google search, the results that show up are pulling from your sites Title tag as its #1 source of important content. Here you are telling everyone what your page is about.

If your page is about a specific endangered koala bear that lives in a certain part of Australia then you could use the title, “Animal, Grey Koala” or you can use more keywords in the title like this, “Endangered Grey Koala’s soon to disappear in Brisbane, Australia”.

The better one is much more descriptive.

Headers

Maybe you have heard about using an H1 tag for important titles and then subsequently H2 tags all the way down to H6 tags.

Recent studies have shown that Google does not care if you properly use the Header tags but it does care if you have text that is larger than others which signifies its a header. So, make the headlines bold. Make them larger.

If you have subheadings, make them obvious subheadings.

Alt Text and Image Captions

These are both for images. If you have an image on the site ANYWHERE it should have “alt” or “alternative” text.

Simply put, if Google can’t find the image, show this text instead. Your text should describe the image but you can also put in a keyword with it. You could write, “Endangered Grey Koala” as he alt text. This would have a few keywords in it and it describes the image as well.

Captions are pretty straight forward but they are callouts about the image itself. This way Google can index your image based on your alt text and the caption. If your image is clickable then you can also add something called Title text to your link.

Just another way Google indexes everything and tries to sort it properly.

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This article will pickup on the next post.

In the meantime you can read about our marketing process.