SEO: Two Quick Wins

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can seem like a daunting task. Many companies are so busy with their strategic initiatives and urgent projects that SEO is the last thing on their minds. Wouldn’t it be great if you could increase traffic to your site while working on all those other projects? The good news is there’s low-hanging SEO fruit that your team can execute ASAP—even if they aren’t coders—for a quick win, and who doesn’t love one of those?

Here’s two quick ways your team can improve your search rankings without needing to create new content!

Image Optimization

1) Compression: Smaller files allow the site to load faster, which improves SEO ranking.

• JPEG is preferable to PNG.

• Keep your image sizes below 100Kb whenever possible.

• For images larger than 100Kb, save as Progressive JPEG (it will load progressively instead of all at once).

• For larger animated GIFs, either optimize with Lossy Compression or convert to MP4 (which is the recommended format to increase site accessibility).

2) Alt Text: Google places high importance on image alt text, which improves SEO ranking. Ensuring all images have alt text also increases accessibility and helps keep your site compliant with ADA conformance.

• Edit your site’s code to include alt text for every image, e.g. <img src=”image.jpg” alt=”Click here to view the menu for this location.”> or <img src=”image.jpg” alt=”A filet mignon steak topped with jumbo shrimp.”>

• Keep the alt text short (no more than 125 characters) and relevant to the context the image is used in.

And remember, be sure to plug your site into Google’s PageSpeed Insights for more actionable tasks to improve your loading speed and rankings even further!