The Best Way to Help Your SEO

When it comes to having good SEO, you need to have this one thing down or else your search engine optimization will suffer greatly.

What is that one thing? CONTENT. Content, my friends. As an SEO firm, we operate offices across the country and one thing we can tell you is that people all over love to see good content. Of course, good content doesn't just soothe the soul of humans, it also soothes the souls of the search engines.

You have to write great content! This is the heart of your SEO efforts. What is great content? It is content that helps people, is captivating, relatable, interesting, and even sales-oriented. Great content shows your customers why they need your services and how you can better their lives. It gets people to realize they have a connection with your brand. Sure, you can write about your cat and how he is adorable but that will not work for your flooring site.

You have to write unique content. This means no copying what other people write. One, that's plagiarism. Two, if you avoid that, it just looks tacky. Do your own research and find out what people want to read and write about that. Write stuff that is not on other sites or other pages of your site. As an SEO company, we can't stress this enough. People hate it. Search engines hate it.

Post new content frequently. Your site should have new content added to it on a regular basis. A site that adds new content is seen as more credible than static sites. Your rankings will see great improvements if you do this. Search engine rankings are sometimes hard to achieve, you want to do all you can to get them!

Need help creating great content? Then contact Integraphix who has a whole team of talented marketing specialists who write specifically for SEO purposes.

Why Optimize Images for the Web

In order for your website to rank well on the internet, it has to be optimized. One aspect of websites that have to be optimized are the images. When images are not optimized, that hurts the chances of being ranked well on search results.

Search engines like it when every part of your website is optimized; however, even just in regards to the images, when they are optimized, they are much more likely to be pulled up in the images tab on search results.

What does it mean to optimize images? There are 5 parts to an image that have to be optimized.

1. Alt tag
2. File name
3. File size
4. Caption

What do these do? Why should they matter? Well… 

1. The alt tag is what the search engines read to find out what the image is. Since they don't have eyes to see what an image looks like, they go by words. No alt tag? Search engines will have no idea what the image is, they like to know. This is a great text alternative when browsers are not able to render an image correctly. It will add lots of SEO value to your site. Using plain English is a good idea here.  
2. File name is what the image is labeled when saved. Why does this matter? Well, it is more information for the search engines to pull when a search is made. An image named "liow20u09508.jpg" will mean nothing when someone searches for a "Ford Mustang 2014", however, an image named, "2014-red-ford-mustang.jpg" will do you good. 
3. The file size does indeed matter. Why? Well, if your file is too large, then the image will take lots of time to load (load times impact SEO rankings). Make the image a small file size.  
4. The caption is more information for the search engine and is also good for human viewers. People will read this to find out what is going on in an image and this means less bounce rate (that impacts rankings). 

Don't know how to optimize your images? Then contact Integraphix, a Chicago SEO firm that services the whole country! Our marketing specialists have in-depth SEO knowledge and can help get your site properly optimized. 

Do Keywords Still Matter in SEO?

Keywords still matter in the world of Search engine optimization. Keywords are just as important to successful SEO now as they always have been. When it comes to content marketing, if you do not use keywords, then your content is not optimized; if your content is not optimized, then it is not easily findable.

There are people who think that the usage of keywords is outdated, keywords are still used by search engines to categorize content that they index. The search engines, especially Google, search for keywords in many aspects of content (we will discuss this in a bit). As search behaviors change, search engines rely on keywords more and more to find relevant information. For example, a major new search technique is "conversational search"; this type of search is like, "Where is the nearest dry cleaner?" This is in contrast of traditional search queries like, "Dry cleaner in C
hicago" etc.

Keywords will not improve your page rank. There are other factors that websites have to adhere to in order to get good rankings; a keyword helps your page be categorized after being indexed, like we previously mentioned.

So where do keywords need to be in content? 

• URL
• Title of content
• Document name
• H1, H2, H3 headings
• image names
• Image ALT tags
• Image captions
• Meta description tags (despite claims to the contrary)

Whether you are using written content for SEO or just to have another tool for marketing, make sure you use keywords. Great SEO means being found on the internet, so make sure you have quality SEO done. To get the best SEO techniques, then hire an SEO firm. Contact Integraphix for SEO services!