A Simple Search Engine Optimization Tip That Really Works

As a Virtual Assistant one of the areas that you may choose to specialize is in SEO, better known as Search Engine Optimization. This can be a very lucrative niche as the results of doing your job well will directly impact the sales of your client’s products and services. Search Engine Optimization is simply the art ans science of getting your client’s Website or pages on their website to be on or near the fist page of Google when a potential customer searches for businesses or products your client provides. I have done this with many of my clients and the results it produces can be phenomenal. Not to mention the wonderful feedback and ego boost you get as a result of having your client’s site in the top 10 postion on Google, MSN or Yahoo.

Now that you know why SEO is important let me give you just one tip today that can start you on your way to improving your client’s Website rank.

When search engine robots visit your web pages, they evaluate the content on your page and assign you a score - which is later used to rank your page for display in search engine results on key phrases.

Because getting a high ranking in the search engine is so important to survival on the Internet, the goal of every web site owner should be to ‘feed’ the search engine robots with any information which might raise the site’s score and search engine ranking.

Here’s a very simple, very effective, and very often overlooked way to feed additional information to the search engine robots.

Feeding the Robots

See the image below this line? When I moved my mouse over the image and let it hover there for a few seconds the text you see appeared with additional information about that image. That is what the search engine robots will learn about that image when they visit.

To do this just use your Web Design software to add the Alt and Title tags to each image on your client’s Website. Such as illustrated in the image below.

The Added Benefits

Adding extra information to the images and links on your page is quite simple, but can have some substantial benefits including:

• Providing more information to page visitors
• Providing more information to search engine robots
• Enabling the images and links to be used in ‘braille’ browsers
• Enabling the images and links to be used in ‘voice’ browsers (the alternate text will be ’spoken’ by the browser when a visitor moves their mouse over the link or image
• Brings you much closer to being in compliance with federal government web site usability standards.

Compare that to your own site. Are you using the alt and title tags to feed the search engines?

If you do use these tags and your competitors don’t, it will give you an advantage in search engine rankings they may never figure out.

For more information on how to improve your Client’s Search Engine Ranking keep your eye out for the upcoming classes I will be teaching on SEO here at the VA Training Club.

Technorati Tags: SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Michelle Schoen, VA Training Club, virtual assistant, virtual assistance, image tags