The new skinny on Search Engine Optimization

Guest Blogger – Jonathan, Graphic Design intern for DEAO

Below are some tips from Jonathan to increase your search engine optimization.

During the past months, I’ve been researching how we can improve our Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) on RecycleGuys.org, RE3.org and RecycleMoreNC.org. S.E.O. is optimizing how well search engines find and query our websites. They have “crawlers” (kind of like little web spiders) looking at our content and images, finding what’s relevant and trustworthy and what’s not depending on someone’s search.

When you author blog posts, make sure that the information stays consistent and dependable. The title of the post should be catchy and valid to the post. Important words need to be bolded or italicized (however, this doesn’t mean bold or italicize everything, but only the important things. It’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, if everything is deemed as important, nothing will be).

When you post images, they should have an alt tag (this is a verbal description of the image read by the computer for people who have images shut off on their websites or may be blind) as well as title tags, and all need to be relevant to the image content. Even the name of the image needs to be relevant. For example, a picture filename of a MRF shouldn’t read “DRZ_0289.jpg,” it should read “sonoco-mrf-2010.jpg,” or something to that effect.

Through my research, I also found some new news in the world of S.E.O. Most people aggregate their information via Twitter, Facebook and blogs. They aren’t as dependent upon search engines as they once were. Twitter is one of the world’s most popular sources for news. Links get shared and “liked” constantly via Facebook. Basically, whenever you write anything or make any announcements, you need to post them onto Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, really wherever you can.

When we create anything new, we need to make sure the general S.E.O. requirements are upheld still, but the social networks have become a force to be reckoned with!