Tips on how to Optimize your Website for SEO

This is an add-on to my previous blog post about Key Fundamentals about SEO for Ecommerce — Part Two. We would suggest to read that before reading this post.

The way your page is optimized for SEO has a huge impact on its ability to rank. We will be going over some best practices we have learned after doing research and building out our own store.

We compiled an easy to follow list for you below.

Optimize your meta description for search engines

Keep your character count under 150.
Google and other search engines change this from time to time, so make sure you keep up-to-date on any changes.
Put the most important information in the first 120 characters of your meta description.
Make sure your meta description clearly describes your page and includes necessary keywords.
Each one of your pages should have a unique meta description.

Use search engine friendly URLs

✅ www.mywebsite.com/unicorn-city-guide
❌ www.mywebsite.com/asdfg#jk

Optimize your title tags

Keep your page titles under 70 characters so they don’t get cropped in results.
Write page titles that sound human and are not just optimized for search engines.
Don’t over optimize or make your title a string of keywords. This is considered keyword stuffing and can cause your site to get penalized.

Use heading structure

Ensure H1 tags (An HTML tag is a snippet of code that tells your web browser how to display content on your website. Heading HTML has six different tags — H1, H2, H3 and so on. The H1 is considered the most important tag, and the H6 is the least important) are used before other header tags (H2, H3, H4).
Your header tags should be used in a hierarchical order. For example, H1 tag above H2 tag, H2 tag above H3 tag, and so on.
Only include one H1 tag on any single page. This tag should describe the page and ideally include the primary keyword.
The structure should be as follows: 1 H1 heading, 1–3 (maximum) H2 headings, more H3, and even more H4.

Use image alt tags for any images you include within your content

Your alt tags should be between 5 and 8 words.
While your first priority should be describing and providing context to the image; try to include primary and secondary keywords to improve your keyword frequency.
Keep descriptions clear.
Don’t use the same keywords for all images. They may be similar, but change up the wording.
Include your keywords in the file name of the image. Instead of image1.jpg, change this to green-king-size-mattress.jpg.
Be mindful that customers who have visual impairments may use a screen reader to help dictate the information on a website. This means a person is able to “hear” the content of your alt tags. It’s important to create descriptions that are useful to your customers, as well as website crawlers. Try to be as descriptive as possible.

Use outbound links

Links related to outbound pages help Google figure out your page’s topic with relevancy signals. It also shows Google that your page is a hub of quality information.

Use latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords

LSI keywords are synonyms or related terms that Google uses to determine a page’s relevance (and possibly quality). LSI keywords can be found by searching for your keyword in Google and scrolling down to the “Searches Related to…” area at the bottom of the page.

Woorank has a great article that will walk you through how you can use LSI keywords and why they’re effective.

Hope these tips help you in ranking on Search Engines! I’ve gathered this list through the research I have been doing so I can implement strategies on our ecommerce store. If you’d like to follow along our journey on building an ecommerce store from scratch, take a look at our previous posts.

If you ever want to connect, don’t hesitate to DM me on IG, click here to head to my profile. Throw me any questions you have, any feedback, suggestions, or if you need help with your store.

Thank you to everyone that made it this far in reading this post, if you did make it this far, I know you’re interested in building your own store. Trust me just go do it. Build the sh*t out of it. Keep building and don’t ever stop.

PEACE And take care everyone! I will be back.