How to Improve the SEO of a Website – Our Top Tips
Many business owners these days will have heard about Search Engine Optimisation (otherwise known as SEO). It can be a great way to boost your business, be seen by more people, and reach your desired customer more easily. However, it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming to know where to start. It is important to have an SEO strategy – this will provide focus to your efforts and make sure that everything you do is leading to the same goal.
We’ve gathered up our top tips here to help break through the confusion and get you moving on your SEO plans.
Consider User Experience
User experience has a large impact on your Google ranking. Google and other search engines want to provide results that are as useful to the searcher as possible, so quick load times, interesting and varied content, and perceived authority on the subject are all factors that the search algorithms look for in the pages on your site.
Optimise Your Website
You want to make your website as searchable by the algorithms as possible. So, include a meta description for each page and a title tag for headings and subheadings. Use internal links to help the user (and the search bots) find other pertinent information on your website.
You should use alt text on your images, graphics, and videos – this provides a text description that the search engine bots can process. It also serves to make your website more accessible to people with disabilities.
Think About Content
You should provide great content which is as useful as possible. This might be via blog posts that are linked to social media posts. You can use Google Search Console to find target keywords to include in your content – though be careful not to over-stuff as this is perceived negatively by the search bots and could decrease the ranking of your web page.
Using keywords in your blog posts can highlight the content to the search engines and increase your ranking on results pages. When choosing which keywords to use, you should take ‘featured snippets’ into account. These are the small parts of a web page given at the top of a google results page – often providing the answer to a search without the need for the user to enter the webpage.
Analyse Your Performance
You should also use Google Analytics to examine your bounce rate – the number of people who do not stay on your website after clicking. Obviously, you want this to be as low as possible, and the more focused and useful you are to your target market, the lower it will be. You can use Google Analytics to determine the areas of your website where you most need to improve.
Build Backlinks
To increase the authority of your content and website, you should look into link building – this is when you create links on a third-party site that refers to your content. You can connect with other blogs and businesses to do this as they may be willing to exchange links with you – again, just be careful not to overdo this. The anchor text that you use to ‘host’ the link should also be relevant to the content you are providing.
Final Thoughts
Although there are many ways to improve your search engine rankings, you will likely benefit from using a professional SEO service like ours. It’s our experts’ job to keep up with the ever-changing search engine algorithms, so they know what will work for you.