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What is SEO and why does it matter?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the set of tools and techniques you use to move your website to the top of the results when someone is searching for information on the web. Implementing effective SEO practices from the start ensures that search engines can easily index your pages, products, events, and more, positioning them in the most relevant areas. Great SEO will ensure that your customers see your content first in their search results.

 

Preparation Before Optimization

Before you start assigning titles and descriptions, do your research! Know who your audience is, what they’re looking for, and what you’re providing. Identify relevant keywords for your content with your customer’s needs in mind.

 

Link Building

Search engines evaluate the validity and relevance of your content through links to your pages from other credible websites. Acquiring links from other high-authority websites to your own is called link building and gives your website more credibility. You can do this by creating shareable content, engaging in guest blogging, and collaborating with industry influencers.

 

Stay Updated

Remember, search engine algorithms are constantly changing and becoming more advanced. Stay on top of the current SEO trends and adjust your strategies accordingly to remain relevant.

 

SEO Titles and Descriptions for Pages

Each of your pages under Website > Pages needs an SEO Title and SEO Description. For other pages in the system, such as those created for products and classes, the system will use the item Title and the Short/Meta Description as the SEO Title and SEO Description.

 

Writing Effective SEO Titles

The SEO Title should read like a headline about the page, and should have the geographic area you serve and the topic of the page. If you are specifically targeting local shoppers, include the geographic area you serve as part of the title. Your titles should be brief (ideally 50-60 characters) but descriptive, incorporating relevant keywords for the page. Some examples of title tags are:

• Good: “ Pizza Restaurant”

This title is concise but generic.

• Better: “ Best Pizza Restaurant in Austin”

This title includes a geographic location (Austin) to drive local clicks and foot traffic.

• Best: “ Award-Winning Pizza Restaurant in Austin - Dine-In & Delivery”

This title includes a basic description plus a geographic location and also encourages clicks because it implies quality (award winning) and convenience (dine-in or delivery).

 

Writing Persuasive SEO Descriptions

The SEO Description should be a call to action encouraging someone to click on the page link. Why would they want to go to the page? What will they find there that is interesting? The description should give them a persuasive reason to click on the page link. Why should they visit your page? What unique content or benefits will they find there? The description should give them a persuasive reason to click on your page link. While meta descriptions don’t directly influence search rankings, they do significantly impact click-through rates. Good meta descriptions should be between 150-160 characters long, include the main keywords, and should be catchy enough to grab the attention of your target audience. Each page should have its own unique description. Some examples of meta descriptions are:

• Good: “ Enjoy delicious pizza at our restaurant. Visit us for a great dining experience.”

This description clearly states your main offering but lacks any details that make your pizza restaurant stand out from competitors.

• Better: " Experience the best pizza in town at Luigi’s with fresh ingredients and a cozy atmosphere. Visit us today!"

This version is improved by highlighting the quality of ingredients and an appealing dining atmosphere.

• Best: " Savor award-winning pizzas at Luigi’s in Austin! Enjoy gluten-free options and family-friendly dining. Order online for delivery or dine-in today!"

This description includes the geographic location (Austin), conveys exceptional quality (award-winning), highlights unique offerings (catering to specialty diets), and has a clear call-to-action (order online for delivery or dine-in).

Here is how to put in your SEO Titles and Descriptions:

1. Go to Website > Pages, find the page with which you want to work and click on the Gear Button on the right.
2. Enter your SEO Title. It should be about 7 - 10 words long. You can hover your mouse over the ? help tip for suggestions on what to include.
3. Enter your SEO Description. It should be about 20 - 25 words long. You can hover your mouse over the ? help tip for suggestions on what to include.
4. Click Save.

 

Enhancing SEO and Accessibility with Alternative Text in Images and Image File Names

Screen readers are essential tools for visually impaired and low-vision users navigating the web by relaying image content. These tools can’t interpret images unless you provide Alternative Text, commonly known as alt text, for each image.

Alt text also enhances your SEO by providing search engines with more context about the image content. Because search engines cannot “see” your images, they rely on alt text to understand the image and include it in image search results. Incorporating relevant keywords into your alt text can further enhance your SEO efforts, ensuring your images are discoverable to more users.

While advancements are being made in how search engines process and "understand" images, relying solely on automated processes isn’t foolproof. Alt text allows you to emphasize the key elements and significance of each image.

Add alt text to every image possible on your website. Your alt text should accurately describe the image without being complex. Any image you manually add to a module through the Content Editor can have alt text to clearly convey its relevance and context.

For images you add to products, classes, categories, and other system-generated content, ensure the image file name is a concise description of what the image depicts. The system uses that file name as the alt text making it critical that they accurately reflect the image content.

 

Evaluating and Refining Alt Text

Once your alt text is established, consider running your image(s) through a service like CloudVision API to see how Google reads your images. Use those results to determine if adjustments are needed to your alt text to get the results you want for accessibility and search visibility.

 

Here is how you can add Alternative Text to an image:

1. Log into the system and go to Website > Website Editor.
2. Go to the page that has the image that needs alt text.
3. Click the Edit button (the small pencil) on the gray Module Toolbar that contains the image. Please note: this will work only for modules that use the Content Editor. If the module has a dedicated Image area, the system will use the image file name as alt text for you.

4. Choose one (both methods go to the same place):
   

   a) Click on the image to highlight it, then click on the Insert / Edit Image button in the Content Editor, or,

   b) Right-click on the image and in the popup menu, click Insert Image.

5. In the Insert / Edit Image window, you'll see the Alternative Text field below the URL for the image Source. Add your text there.

 

6. Click OK once you have finished.
7. Click Save at the bottom of the screen to save your work.

 

Best Practices for Alt Text for Your Images

Here is one of the best overviews of the importance of alt text we've seen, provided by Moz.com. In that article, they provide the following guidelines for best practices with alt text:

1. Describe the image as specifically as possible. Alt text is, first and foremost, designed to provide text explanations of images for users who are unable to see them. If an image truly doesn't convey any meaning/value and is just there for design purposes, it should live within the CSS, not HTML.

2. Keep it (relatively) short. The most popular screen readers cut off alt text at around 125 characters, so it's advisable to keep it to that character count or less. Editor's note: This is around 15 to 20 words. You can write longer alt text descriptions, just make sure your important stuff is at the beginning.

3. Use your keywords Alt text provides you another opportunity to include your target keyword on a page, and thus another opportunity to signal to search engines that your page is highly relevant to a particular search query. While your first priority should be describing and providing context to the image, if it makes sense to do so, include your keyword in the alt text of at least one image on the page.

4. Avoid keyword stuffing. Google won't dock you points for poorly written alt text, but you'll be in trouble if you use your alt text as an opportunity to stuff as many relevant keywords as you can think of into it. Focus on writing descriptive alt text that provides context to the image and if possible, includes your target keyword, and leave it at that.

5. Don't use images as text. This is less of an alt text-specific best practice and more of a general SEO-friendly web development tenet. Because search engines can't read text within your images, you should avoid using images in place of words. If you must do so, explain what your photo says within your alt text.

6. Don't include "image of," "picture of," etc. in your alt text. It's already assumed your alt text is referring to an image, so there's no need to specify it.

In the example image in the section above, the image is of a snowboarder in the middle of an epic jump, with mountains in the background. This would have made a good alt text description. I chose to add a little marketing to the description, so mine reads Utah snowboarder soaring over powder snow on his Alpine snowboard with the beautiful Wasatch Mountains as background. Think about the kind of description you would want to hear if you couldn't see the image. The second description has seventeen words, and 117 characters, including spaces, so it would work just fine for any reader.

 

Please Note: The pros at Moz.com include a couple more guidelines than those listed above that are more technical, along with a ton of other excellent information, so if you want to explore the full list, please click on the link above!

 

SEO-Effective Content

What makes a web page compelling and interesting for you? Is it engaging images? Relevant videos? Helpful information? Perhaps a download that would be useful? Guess what: That stuff is interesting to everyone, and the search engines keep getting better at finding content that people actually want to see.

You shouldn't be asking yourself if Google will like what you're doing. You should be asking yourself if your target customer will like the content you're making.

One of the best things you can do for your site's search engine optimization is to put in extra effort into adding compelling content. You shouldn't be asking yourself if Google will like what you're doing. You should be asking yourself if your target customer will like the content you're making. If you're doing that, Google will be finding you and sending those people your way. Here are some content ideas that can help add SEO punch to your pages:

1. Keywords Are King - Don't make a huge list, just focus on one or two keywords that are important for each page, and make sure the keywords are on the page at the beginning of the first paragraph (often only the first 75 to 100 characters of text on the page get priority indexing) and that the content centers around those ideas. The search engines will perk up and take notice. Focus on mixing short-tail (broadly defined keywords of one-two words such as " Shoes") and long-tail keywords (clearly intentioned phrases with three or more words such as " How to repair missing eyelets on boots") to reach the largest audience.
2. Mix Your Media - Mix videos, infographics, and podcasts with your standard written text to make your website more engaging. Even if you don't want to start your own YouTube channel (and for the record, that's easy to do, and good for your site traffic!), producing your own videos and uploading them to platforms like YouTube can drive traffic back to your website through links in the video description. This can be a great way to add to your marketing returns: provide a video for something useful to your target audience, feature products and/or services in the video, then link back to those pages on your site. It's best to use your own videos, but if creating original content is too daunting, consider embedding relevant videos from trusted sources in your industry to add value (such as a manufacturer’s video of something you sell).
3. Always Remember User Experience - Make sure your content is easy to navigate by breaking up the information into “bite-sized” pieces. Use headings, labels, bullets, images, and other formatting tools to break up your content and make it easier to scan. Include links to related articles (ideally, your own) and clear calls to action (e.g., “Download our brochure” or “Sign up now”). And don’t forget to prioritize a responsive, mobile-friendly design that loads quickly when you’re setting up your website. Nothing frustrates users like a page that doesn’t load instantly.
4. Free Stuff Makes the Internet Go 'Round - People love quality free stuff.  Do you know a special technique for something that's useful in your industry? Record a video and embed it on your website. Are you knowledgeable enough in your industry to write a booklet-sized document and provide it as a free PDF download on your site? Offering complimentary  eBooks, audio files, or samples can encourage customers to explore your products and services further. This strategy not only builds goodwill but can also turn free trial users into paying customers, all while improving your site’s SEO by encouraging longer visits and more engagement.

 

Six SEO Best Practices You Need to Do Now

How do you get ranked so you'll appear on the first page of search results? What is the competition doing that makes them show up there? Here are some important things you can and should be doing to improve your SEO over time in order to get to that first page:

1. Keep Your Content Fresh - Update your Home page multiple times a week with fresh content; feature new products and categories, swap out a slideshow image periodically, adjust your welcome message or other text on the page. For other pages on the site, update them as often as is practical, monthly at the least. Your website visitors will appreciate the fresh content, and the search engines won't flag you as a stagnant website.
2. Build Backlinks - Backlinks are links from other sites that go to yours, and they are extremely helpful in increasing your search relevancy. You can build your backlinks by being active on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media and linking back to your products, services, and events. Another helpful source of backlinks is having your own external blog (see below). You can check how you're doing with this free backlink checker from NeilPatel.com. Regularly monitor your backlinks and remove any outdated or harmful links.
3. Start a Blog - It's recommended to start a blog using one of the big providers such as WordPress or Blogger. They have amazing tools for facilitating your blog features and organizing your posts. If you can blog weekly or more, you're on the right track, and you should be linking back to products and other pages on your website often. You'll start building a following if you offer great content, interesting perspectives and commentary, and free stuff.
4. Use Online Tools to Find the Keywords You Should Be Focusing On - There are a ton of tools out there that are made to help you research keywords that you should be using: many of them can be tricky, and some can be expensive. A good place to start is this list of free keyword research tools. Use tools such as these to find what your target audience is actually searching for, and then focus your content and marketing on those things. The keywords will change organically over time, so it's good to do these searches periodically.
5. Track Your Traffic with Analytics - When your Account Manager takes your Rain system website live for you, we set up Google Analytics for you so that from day one, your website traffic data is being tracked. There is a LOT to Analytics, and learning how to use it can seem like a monstrous task. We recommend that you go through the easy steps of the Google Analytics Academy, a free tool to walk you through how to use the amazing tool set offered by Analytics. If you do not yet know how to log into your analytics, call in to our support team at 385-404-6200 and we'll make sure to get you your login info.
6. List Your Company with Google Business Profile - Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is the dedicated index for company details and locations used by Google. Being listed here will offer the best possible information whenever your business comes up in a Google search, including primary areas of your website, business hours, location map, etc. Companies not registered and verified with Google Business Profile have minimal information provided when they come up in searches, and have lower relevancy. Here is how to get started. It can also be valuable to list your business with Bing and Yahoo.

 

Wait, What About Metatags?

Some meta tags are important: title tags, meta descriptions, viewport meta tags (for responsive design), robot meta tags (that guide search engines on how to crawl and index your webpage), and the charset meta tag (usually UTF-8, this tells browsers how to display your text).

The Rain system has you covered for title tags and meta descriptions.. Remember up above where we talked about entering your SEO Title and SEO Description? The data you put into those areas goes directly into page header tags for those two critical things.

If you choose to put any additional tags into your pages, you can do so by going to the page in the admin view, clicking on Website > Page Settings, then going to the Advanced tab.

If you're wondering about keyword meta tags, don't bother. These tags have been so overused in the past that major search engines like Google largely ignore them and they have become obsolete. Here is a great overview from Conductor.com on metatags.