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Posts Tagged: SEO

Every business owner knows that in order for your clients to buy your product or service, they have to find you first. Thus, Location, location, location remains a valid must-have for all businesses alike, be they off or online.

So how do you make sure you’re found online, considering your website is one of the 2 billion live at this moment? There is a multitude of actions you can take to make sure your website ranks better than your competitors’ – proper SEO, marketing campaigns, and fast loading times are just a few steps you can take to send your website to the top of the charts.

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January 23rd, 2019

SEO Best Practices for Website Images

Posted by liveBooks

seo tips for website images

When it comes to websites, content may be king, but it’s most effective when combined with great imagery. And this isn’t just guesswork, either! A major portion of our brain’s primary functions is to process visual information, which is why your website should be visually appealing as much as it is informative.

If you’re a wedding industry professional, chances are you depend pretty highly on photographs to showcase your samples of work. As you should!

Couples love seeing examples of previous weddings. They are great for inspiration and give potential clients a sense of your style.

However, if your website images aren’t optimized properly, they could be doing more harm than good. Be sure you follow these search engine optimization (SEO) best practices when publishing images to your website.

Consistency in Style

Our first tip is more directly related to user experience, but when your online visitors are more engaged with your website, it can indirectly help your SEO.

Before you even think about adding a photograph, image or graphic onto your website, ask yourself some key questions:

  • Does it match my brand?
  • Will it speak to my ideal audience?
  • Does it look consistent with other visuals I have already placed on my website?

If the image would look cohesive with your branding style, colors and niche market, great! Move on to our next steps. If not, look for something better (or create one yourself!). Remember to focus on quality over quantity.

Resize for Web Use

As great as high-quality photographs are for printing, big files (especially images that are several megabytes, or MB, in size) can only slow down your website load times.

Why does this matter? Well, for one, website visitors may leave and find another faster website if yours is loading too slowly. Second, your site speed directly affects how well your website performs on search engines like Google.

Photographs don’t need to be more than 72 dpi (dots per inch) for digital purposes. Most photographs, however, start around 300 dpi, causing them to be bigger in size (bytes). Ideally, images should be around 200-800 KB maximum each.

This may be way over your head, but you aren’t alone. That’s where liveBooks’ advanced image compression tools can help. When you upload your photos to your liveBooks website, they are automatically optimized for the best combination of quality and performance. If you would like to choose each image format on your own, then you can configure the advanced settings. You change an image’s quality and performance by dragging a slider – one direction will improve the resolution, while the other side will improve the image’s loading time and performance.

Image Titles and Alt-Text

Ever wonder how Google knows which images to pull up when you do an image search?

To put it simply, search engines use what they call “spiders” that scan through websites all over the web for information. In order to know what an image relates to or depicts, it relies on the image title and alt-text.

When your website images rank well for the same keywords within the actual content of your website (such as your services or about pages), your overall ranking for those keywords increases.

With liveBooks’ image tools, you have the ability to easily optimize your images for search engines. In the SEO tab, you can add keyword-optimized image title tags and alt-text to your images. For example, if you post a blog highlighting a recent wedding you photographed at a popular wedding venue, the image titles and alt-text should reflect keywords couples would search for on Google to see what weddings hosted there typically look like.

You might even add a few that focus on your particular role as a wedding photographer. Some you might use for this situation could be:

  • Mansion wedding venues in Chicago
  • Wedding photos at the Stan Mansion
  • Stan Mansion wedding portraits
  • Best wedding photographer in Chicago
  • Chicago wedding photographer

Showcase Your Work on a Beautiful Website

liveBooks offers stunning, customizable website templates for wedding industry professionals and creatives.

Impress your potential clients with a visually stunning website that is ready for search engines and looks great on any mobile device!

We’ve also got a top-notch support team who’s here to help you every step of the way. Start for free today!

Quick Tips for Obtaining Useful Google Analytics Data

On your journey as a small business owner, there will be a few tools that come up that make your life a whole lot easier. One of these tools is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics allows you to track traffic and data coming into your website. This information can make a world of difference in how you market your business and build your online presence. You can use the data Analytics collects to help you determine your next steps when it comes to revising your website and marketing to your customers online.

If you don’t have time to do an in-depth study on all that Google Analytics entails, then here are a few quick tips for navigating the analytical side of your business.

Audience demographics

As a business owner, you’re well aware that knowing your audience is key to building your audience and gearing your products or services towards them.

Google Analytics is an extremely helpful tool you can use to understand your audience. Under the ‘Audience’ tab, you can find a general overview that includes the percentage of users divided by country, city and language.

You can also enable the Demographics which can give you more details on the gender and age of your users. Knowing this information can help you determine who exactly is visiting your website and how you can cater your website to them.

Page traffic

While you can see how much traffic your overall website is getting by day, week, or even month, you can also determine which sections of your website are seeing the most traffic. By segmenting your analytics by page or post, you can see where your visitors are navigating to or spending the most time on. This is helpful knowledge as it allows you to see what your visitors are most interested in on your website.

If you received a significant amount of traffic to a specific blog post, for example, you might consider writing a similar blog post on that topic because it’s clear that it’s something your visitors are interested in. Similarly, if your About Page is receiving a lot of traffic, that tells you that your audience is interested in the story and people behind your business and you can build upon that.

Traffic acquisition

In addition to knowing who your audience is and learning where they navigate to on your website, a key piece of helpful information is knowing where your audience is coming from. Under the Acquisition tab, you’ll find ‘Channels.’ It’s here that you’ll be able to see which sources your traffic is coming from. The main channels include Direct, Organic Search, Referral, Social, Paid Search, and Email.

This information can give you a lot of insight into how people are finding your business online. If you’ve put a lot of effort into your SEO marketing, then you’ll likely see significant traffic coming from Organic Search. If you’ve been focused on social media marketing, then you’ll probably see a good amount of traffic from Social.

Bounce rates

Bounce rates can be tricky to understand. Put simply, they are the percentage of visits in which a person leaves your website from any page on your website without browsing further or clicking on any other pages.

Most businesses will likely want their website visitors to navigate to more than one page or blog post. A higher bounce rate (such as anything above 50%) means that many of your visitors aren’t exploring more than one page or blog post before leaving. This is seen as a negative “score” in Google’s eyes, because it assumes that those who leave that quickly didn’t find the information engaging and/or useful.

Focus on improving user experience on pages or posts with high bounce rates, and encourage them to click on other pages through buttons and links.

Optimize Your Website’s Design Today

If the data you see in Google Analytics isn’t what you’d hoped it would be, then it may be time to change up your design and content.

With a liveBooks website, you’ll be able to use our stunning, customizable website templates that look great on any mobile device!

We’ve also got a top-notch support team who’s here to help you every step of the way. Start for free today!

What started in the late 1990s as a personal platform to share interests to the online public, blogs have steadily developed as trustworthy sources of information and pillars of communities whose followers may not be living in the same geographic region as the blogger, but their bond to the content creator and the rest of the members is as sturdy as they get.

Blogs come in many shapes: from the classic textual weblog, to vlogs (video blogs) or podcasts. But what emerged as an online-diary created and updated by only one individual is now becoming more obviously a very useful tool for businesses. Not only do they guarantee a constant flow of content, they are also the perfect answer to the newly-emerged question: WHO are these companies?

Trust is earned through hard work and commitment, and businesses rely on blogs more these days to assure the general public that their heart is in the right place. So they share their actions, their thoughts, their vision with everyone who would lend an ear. Whether in marketing campaigns or simple year-round content creation, businesses now turn to blogs to build better bridges.

The results? A reliable online community, an increase in brand visibility and more happy clients. If you’re not still convinced your creative business needs a blog, give this piece a thought.

Before starting a blog, you will need to take some things into consideration:

  • You will need to be consistent, make a schedule and stick to it.
  • You must find the topics that best suit you and your business and create your posts around them.
  • You should know who your target is and adjust your writing persona to them.
  • You should use an online platform that is easy to update.

We’ve already covered the top three items in a previous article, so make sure you give that a read to familiarize yourself to the process of starting a blog. So what we’re left is choosing the best platform for your followers and ultimately for yourself.

Use your website as the platform for your blog

There’s a chance you already have a website to showcase your products or services. It’s also very likely you’ve covered all the SEO bases and the website is generating valuable reach each day. So why use another platform for your blog when you can incorporate it to your website under a separate page? Think of all the perks this merger brings.

SEO
Take the SEO you already have set up for your website and add to the reach well-placed keywords within your blog posts can bring! Furthermore, think of your visitors: now they won’t have to change tabs to read your blog, instead they’ll spend more time on your website, where they can easily find your contact info and thus, making it easier for them to get in touch with you.

One platform
Adding a blog to your website means you don’t need to familiarize yourself with the functionalities of a stand-alone blog platform. This affects how you see your future blog posts: the easier it is to post them, the more likely you are to keep posting.
Choose a responsive platform that allows you to easily edit and upload your posts on the go. Once the restrains of your work-space are cut off, the limit to your possibilities goes with it.

One login
We have created tons of users and passwords for our online presence. Too many to keep track of. So why create another if you can bypass this altogether? Having your blog on the same platform as your website means you login once and all your tools are there for you to use.

Regular updates
We know updating your website is more than often postponed. If you had your website and blog on the same platform, though, every time you logged in to post something, you’ll inevitably be reminded that you need to address your website, too. Chances are you’ll find a couple of minutes to make those changes and provide your visitors with new content.

liveBooks is the website builder that allows blog incorporation on the same platform. Your posts, as well as your portfolio, are easy to update and share.

Try our responsive platform today and start your 14-day FREE trial!

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