Add alt tags to your images, and everyone can enjoy the visual experience of your website—whether they see it with their eyes or their ears. Best of all, alt text helps your images appear in Google Image Search, which accounts for over 20% of online searches. You can add alt text to your images in the Sitecore Media Library.
For example, the alt text for the image above might read “pie chart showing share of web searches by search engine, including google 62. 6% google images 22. 6% youtube 4. 3% yahoo 2. 4% amazon 2. 3% bing 2. 2% facebook 1. 4% google maps 1. 3% pinterest 0.
4%” To give your image SEO an extra boost, use keywords in the file name of your image, too (feel free to copy and paste what you used for the alt text). Internal links describe any link on your website that links to another page on your website. You’ll see your internal links in your main navigation, in your site menus, and in your content.
This placement likely makes them the most-linked-to pages on your website. Google will interpret that to signify that these pages are very, very important (which will hopefully encourage them to rank those pages higher for relevant keywords). Whenever you link to internal pages within your content, you’ll want to optimize your anchor text to give Google more context about what the linked page is about.
When adding anchor text, include keywords when it makes sense, and avoid generic anchor text that doesn’t say much about the link, such as “click here.” For example, at Engagency, we might encourage you to “Learn more about our Sitecore implementations,” but we wouldn’t tell you to “Click here to learn about our Sitecore implementations.” You can add anchor text in Sitecore by highlighting the text you want to link and clicking the link icon in the Sitecore Content Editor.
Schema is based on a vocabulary developed by Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! That means that when you add schema to your website, you’re speaking the search engines’ language. That can only spell good things for your SEO. Schema will not appear on the page your visitors see, as it lives in the code.
Schema provides more information to search engines. That alone makes it useful for SEO, as the better a search engine understands your web page, the better job it can do at ranking you for the appropriate keywords. More importantly, however, certain schema actually expands the size of your search result in Google—displaying your traditional blue link result with star ratings, pricing information and availability, recipe steps, and photos.
With more visibility, you may enjoy higher click-through rates. According to one study, adding schema increased a website’s click-through rate by 30%! When you add schema in Sitecore, follow these best practices: Site speed and optimization is a critical part of SEO. However, it’s such a can of worms, that we felt this topic deserved its own dedicated article.
Implement the on-page SEO tactics above, and your site will be well on its way to better rankings and more qualified traffic. If your Sitecore implementation was not setup properly and you’re struggling to manage your on-page SEO, contact Engagency. We’re here to make Sitecore intuitive and easy to use, so your team can get the most out of your website—and your SEO.
Online search is at an all-time high, and the quest for a high Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking is Shangri-La. Google is projected to hit 2. 5 trillion searches this year with 92. 7% of the global search market share. That’s a lot of people looking for a lot of information.
Google has evolved quite a bit since it’s conception in 1997. The search engine is now sophisticated enough to finish our sentences. At the same time the search engine optimization (SEO) industry has also matured. Many SEO experts possess a unique combination of analytical, technical, content strategy, and program management skills – the work of getting your pages to rank is both an art and a science.
Definition: Search engine optimization is the practice of managing the content of a webpage to help move it closer to the top of user search results in Google and other search engines. Imagine your disappointment if you planned an extraordinary party and no one knew about it. Similarly, what if you spent days or months building web pages with content that should resonate with readers, but Google and other search engines simply pass them by? To drive traffic and readers to your site, your pages need to be optimized for Google and other search engines to “crawl” them – literally examine every word and object on the page.