Recently, I created a website. Confused about why my site wasn't showing up in Google search, I spoke with our Online Marketing Manager, Matthew Pancione. He helped me understand how to optimize my site's organic search rankings.
There are two levels to optimizing your website for search. In Website > [name of site] > Site settings, you can edit the name of your site, the title of your homepage in search results, and create a headline and subheadline for your site.
In each page of your site, there are several ways to optimize your natural search rankings. The first step is using keywords in the name of a page and the page slug. While the page slug will auto-populate when you name a page, you can always revise the slug. Use keywords in your page slugs - paying attention to the order of words (the first word in the slug is the most important keyword).
Excerpt is an often over-looked field that is accessible from Settings > SEO and Settings > Social media.
The excerpt is a one or two sentence summary of the content of the page, which shows up when your page appears in search results. It is also displayed by Facebook when someone shares the page URL in a status update. When you update the excerpt field under Settings > SEO, it will automatically update that field under Settings > Social media and vice versa. Updating the field in the social media tab will allow you to also update the post prompt for Facebook and Twitter.
You can review the SEO settings for all pages in your website from Website > [name of site] > SEO.
Additional areas that can be tweaked to enhance your natural search rankings include:
- Using keywords as anchor text because search engines associate those words with your page
- Focusing on keywords in image descriptions for each image inserted into a page. The filename of the image is used as the image description by default. We suggest replacing this with a concise description. For example, we updated the description of the above image as seen below:
By optimizing your SEO settings you can help your website rank higher in organic search results, driving more traffic without relying solely on paid advertising.
