Basic best practices for updated website content
So you’ve had a website designed and developed. You love it. Obviously (because we did it, right?).
Our team at Denver Media Group has optimized your website for search engines, implemented strategic keyword placement, metadata - the works.
Now that your site has launched, what can you do to ensure any new content you create follows along the same path?
In our opinion, it would be silly to not follow best practices when it comes to uploading your own new, fresh content.
As much as we’d love to create content for you through blogs and other media, we fully understand that sometimes it’s simply not in the budget. And that’s ok! We still want your business to be successful online.
When adding new content to your website via blogs or images, there are a few best practices that you can take for on-page SEO purposes. While you might not understand SEO fully, it’s never a bad idea to implement what you can.
Basic best practices for updated website content:
Have a blog.
Chances are if you’ve worked with us for your website, we’ve highly encouraged you to have a blog page on your website. It’s safe to say, almost 100% of our website builds include a blog page.
You might think you don’t have anything to “say” on a blog or that blogs are only used for the influencer or home interior industry. Actually, no. Blogs are for every industry!
Why? A blog page is one of the easiest ways to keep updated, current content on your website. To be in Google’s good graces, it’s always important to have updated content.
Blogs should be written, at minimum, once a week.
Naming conventions.
When writing your blog, it’s always a nice touch to add some images to your blog post.
To keep your images optimized for SEO, your images need to be named in a specific way.
Bad image names for SEO:
IMG1234.jpg
BobandBilly.jpg
Cheeseburger_Buns.jpg
When creating a file name, you want Google to know what it’s looking without actually looking at it. Keep it simple, yet descriptive.
Good image names for SEO:
Denver-colorado-sunset.jpg
Sunset-denver-colorado.jpg
Orange-denver-sunset.jpg
Notice using dashes (-) instead of underscores (_). Underscores are no longer recognized by Google algorithms, meaning they would make the words run on.
Image size.
Keep your images small enough in file size to load quickly, but sized appropriately to display without pixelation.
Ideally, the dimensions for a web image should be 1500 to 2500 pixels on the long edge. Images smaller than 1500 pixels can appear pixelated.
The simplest way to resize your images is by using design tools like as Adobe Photoshop or Gimp.
Alt text.
Always give your images alt text when you’re uploading them to your website or blog. When uploading images, you’ll be prompted in the window to add it. Don’t ignore it!
Alt text describes the image so both search engines and people can make sense of it should it not be displayed for any reason.
These few best practices will help to keep your website organized and optimized for on-page SEO. Though they may be seemingly tedious, it’s the small things that keep a familiar handshake going with search engines.