How an SEO Partner Can Boost Your Business + Free Guide for SEO During a Site Build

How an SEO Partner Can Boost Your Business + Free Guide for SEO During a Site Build

Business partnerships can help you boost your business and reach more of the ideal clients without having to spend your already limited time learning new skill sets. This especially applies to SEO partnerships! Read on for my experiences working as a business partner and my tips for navigating a successful interview process.

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Simple SEO to Boost Your Launch Traffic

Simple SEO to Boost Your Launch Traffic

Often SEO (search engine optimization) can fall through the cracks when launching or relaunching a website, event, product, or program. Read on for my tips for not only boosting your launch and site traffic with strategic SEO, but how that strategy can attract the right customers and clients who are already searching for you!

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6 Essential Strategies for Squarespace SEO

6 Essential Strategies for Squarespace SEO

Use these 6 essential Squarespace SEO strategies to rank your content! Squarespace SEO gets a bad rep, but as an SEO consultant, I want to share just how powerful Squarespace SEO is. Their built-in SEO combined with a dedicated content strategy & a few tweaks will give you everything you need to optimize your site.

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SEO Basics: How to Optimize Images, Alt Tags + Page Speed (SEO 101 Part Two)

This post originally appeared on The Lean Green Bean blog, as part two of a series. If you missed part one, I recommend checking that out first- SEO 101: How to Increase Organic Search Traffic for Blog Posts. All caught up? Let’s dig in to part two.

You’ve installed an SEO plugin and fill out your title tags religiously. You spend time coming up with a catchy title and include at least one image with each post.

Now what?

alt text example SEO 201: How to Optimize Images, Alt Tags + Page Speed

Alt tags Even if you made a pretty title image, Google can’t read the text. So if you want it to show up in search, you have to help the search engines by filling in the alternative text. I like to do this as soon as I upload the photo so I don’t forget. If you want to go back and fill in alt tags for old photos, you can either click on the photo in each post, or go to your media gallery.

Don’t stuff this area with keywords! Either use your post title or a relevant phrase or sentence.

If you use a share button for Pinterest, the alt text is often what will show up in the description for the pin, so this is another great reason to be filling it in!

Photo NameThis is an often overlooked area of optimization. Just like you want to optimize the URL for your blog post, you want to optimize the name of your photo, which turns into a URL of its own once it’s hosted on your blog. The name should be short, simple and related to your post.

Title + Description What you fill in here will show up when you hover over the image or while the image is loading.

CaptionYou only need to fill this out if you want a description to show up under your photo in your blog post.

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Compressing Photos

Images are one of the biggest culprits for slow page load time, which affects everything from reader retention and engagement to SEO rankings.

Here are three ways you can shrink your images and optimize them for the web:

Plugin optionsInstall the WP Smush.It plugin to optimize your images. This plugin will optimize each new photo you add behind the scenes, and you can also run all existing photos through the plugin in your media library.

smush it plugin SEO 201: How to Optimize Images, Alt Tags + Page Speed

Manual OptionsSave your images as PNG files and upload to http://www.tinypng.com. Then download and upload to your blog. If you’re creating your image with Picmonkey, like many bloggers these days, you’ll see the formatting option when you hit “save.”

tinypng SEO 201: How to Optimize Images, Alt Tags + Page Speed

Save for Web If you’re using photo editing software like Photoshop, you can choose the “save for web” option.

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Page Load Time

According to Kissmetrics.com, “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.”

Test your load time with GT Metrix. GT Metrix also gives you a detailed report of what you can do to improve your speed. I recommend having a developer take a look and help you make the changes. Some of them can be technical and require understanding code.

WordPress can install the WP-Cache 3 plugin. “W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.”

Here are 26 other tools to improve your site’s speed.

Want to expedite your blog rankings and traffic? Join my brand new, FREE 6-day Challenge

I’m hosting my very first online challenge and I’d love for you to join us.

seo basics how to optimize images alt tags and page speed
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Danielle Zeigler

I’m an SEO specialist + digital marketing strategist with over 14 years experience in the industry. I’m here to tell you it IS possible to tackle your marketing with authenticity, grace and ease, and still get results.⁠

I work with passionate business owners and marketing directors who are 𝘁𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗿𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗱𝗼 𝗔𝗹𝗹 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 and spreading their efforts too thin. They want to know what's working, what's not working, and where they should really be spending their time and money.⁠

But I'll be honest- I'm not here for the people chasing vanity metrics. My philosophy is grounded in 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲-𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 and what I've dubbed #SEOwithSoul. I don't believe in hacks and "beating algorithms" as a long term strategy.⁠