5 Things to Know to Optimize your Website | SEO Montreal

Hi there, I’m the SEO expert from this SEO Montreal Company. Today, I will be sharing 5 things to know to optimize your website.

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#1. Meta Description | SEO Montreal

To my best knowledge, meta descriptions aren’t used as a ranking signal, but they can influence click through rates. For that reason, I think it’s important to add to your pages. Now, it’s important to note that according to our study of 192,000 pages, we found that Google rewrote meta descriptions nearly 63% of the time. So I wouldn’t spend a ton of time on them, but you should still include them. To learn more about Meta Description, click on the bolded link.

#2. Internal Links | SEO Montreal

Alright, next up is to add internal links to and from your pages. Internal links are links from one page on the same domain to another. They’re super-powerful because they can pass link authority to other relevant pages and they also help search engines better understand a page’s contents. For example, if I had a site in the careers niche, and I was writing a post about “how to write a cover letter”, then I’d definitely want to add internal links from other relevant pages like one on how to write a resume. More importantly, visitors who want to learn how to write a resume would probably want to know how to write a cover letter and vice versa. To find opportunities, you can go to Google and search for a site: yourdomain.com and then add the topic you’re writing about. Then visit relevant pages and see if there’s an opportunity to add an internal link to your new post. Alright, next up is to optimize your images. 

#3. Naming Images | SEO Montreal

Name your image files appropriately. For example, you have a picture of a puppy. If you took the photo yourself, then chances are, your smartphone or camera named it something like IMG_ and then a million numbers. Instead, change the filename to something like… puppy. Not exactly rocket science, but according to Google, filenames can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image.

#4. ALT Text for Images

Use descriptive alt text. Alt text, short for alternative text, is an HTML attribute that goes in your image tag. Alt text helps improve accessibility for those who are using screen readers or if the image fails to load, visitors will be shown the alt text instead. Now, Google recommends “creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page.” Yes, Google explicitly says to use keywords, but they also say to avoid stuffing keywords as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam. Meaning, don’t do something like fill a simple paragraph with 20 of the keywords. Now, looking back at the syntax, our alt text isn’t exactly descriptive. So let’s change that to something like, “puppy sitting on a couch.” If you use WordPress, just add your alt text where it says “ALT text” when inserting your images and the CMS should do the rest. 

#5. Image Size

Alright, the third thing you’ll want to do is compress your images. Compressing images makes your image file sizes smaller, leading to faster load times.

Do you want a professional SEO expert to optimize your website for you? If so, click onto our SEO Montreal page for a free audit!

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