Simple SEO Tips For Website Optimisation
So, you want your business to be successful online. You have a website, but you’re struggling to bring in the volume of traffic you need and you’re wondering why. It could be your website is invisible to online searchers. Sites without search engine optimisation don’t rank online, so they won’t be found. Need a remedy – fast? Implement our simple SEO tips for website optimisation.
What is SEO Optimisation?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving your website visibility in search engines such as Google. Optimising your website involves technical and content fixes that allow search engines to read your site, understand your business, and match you to relevant online searches. The more searches you’re matched to, the more you’ll boost your SEO ranking.
Ready to connect your website to the online world? Let’s get started!
Top SEO Tips for Website Optimisation
Ranking high on search engine results pages (SERPs) will take some time (3-6 months) if you’re new to SEO, but Imagefix’s top SEO tips will get you started, and you’ll start to see improvements soon after:
1. Search Engine Optimise Your Site
The best way to optimise your business website is to invest in SEO website design. This ‘bakes in’ SEO as part of the design, ensuring that – right from the start – your website has the potential to rank. If you’re unsure whether your website has been optimised at the design stage, we would recommend you carry out a free SEO audit. This will give you an SEO score, and a list of fixes.
Sites that haven’t been optimised require a number of off-page (technical) and on-page (content) fixes to improve their online impact.
Technical fixes include:
- Ensuring Your Website is Responsive. A responsive website is a website that has been designed to look and function equally well on mobile or desktop devices. Considering that now, over half of all web traffic is from a mobile phone, responsiveness is an important step to make in the design process.
- Your Site Should Load Fast. Nobody likes waiting for a webpage to load! If your website runs slow, this increases the bounce rate of visitors leaving your site. Using a tool like Google Page Speed Insights, allows you to regularly check page speed across your website. Pages should load in 1-2 seconds.
- Your Site is Internally Linked. Links between pages help search engines to understand the architecture of your site. The linking clarifies the way your business works. This is critical to a search engine’s ability to know which online enquiries to match a site to.
- Demonstrating Your Site is Secure. A search engine optimised website is a secure website. Having HTTPS on your site lets visitors know that their data is safe if they login. You need an SSL certificate to get HTTPS, which shows up as a padlock icon on the left-hand side of your search bar.
2. Research and Implement Keywords
Content SEO revolves around the strategic use of keywords. These are the words or phrases used by online searchers when they are looking for your product. If you have a sportswear business, for example, your keywords would include: women’s gym wear, sportswear brands, designer sportswear, sportswear for kids.
We recommend using an SEO tool such as SE Ranking or SEMRush for keyword research. They allow you to search for keywords, give you similar keyword suggestions, organic results, SERP history, competitor analysis, and search volume. You can also see where you rank in search engines for the keywords you choose.
Using relevant keywords throughout your website copy, and especially your page titles, will help Google to match your pages to online searches. Keep in mind though, your website’s copy needs to be clearly written and easy to read, so don’t overuse keywords. Keyword ‘stuffing’ is penalised by Google.
3. Generate New Content Consistently
Google rewards updated, relevant content. Frequently creating new landing pages, blog posts, encourages Google to rank your content well. Every day people consume so much content, that it can be impossible to recall what we read a few months or even weeks back.
Consistently publishing new blogs increases the chances of people returning to your website for information. Alongside this comes a growing trust, the increased likelihood of it being shared online, and a higher domain authority than competitors who don’t post regularly.
Carefully researched, informative content that’s of value to your readers is highly prized. People are hungry for content that’s useful and up to date, so try to make each piece of content the exact thing your potential customers are looking for.
4. Use Internal, External, and Backlinks
Adding links to other sites for your pages or blogs is an important SEO technique. Go to any website online, and you’ll most likely see links placed throughout their copy. Google regularly crawls through your website by following the links you have placed throughout. There are two types of links regularly used in web content creation:
- Internal links are links to other pages or blogs you have on your website. You may have a sentence in a blog highlighting another service you offer, so you’d add a link to the relevant page on your website.
- External links are links to pages from an external source. Maybe you have included some data in your post and want to add a link to where you got the data from to back up your point. (be sure not to link to your competitors though!).
- Backlinks originate in sites that are linking back to your site. Google sees a backlink as a sign that your site has authority and is respected by trade bodies, researchers, or customers.
When you are writing a blog or page, look for opportunities where you can add in external and internal links into your copy. External links have been cited as one of the most important objectives for attaining a high ranking. They also help make your website a more valuable and scalable resource to incoming traffic, meaning people will likely return if they find something useful.
Ready to Increase Your Visibility?
If you found our SEO tips for website optimisation interesting, but you don’t have the headroom to implement them yourself, we’d love to hear from you. The Imagefix digital marketing team includes SEO experts, keyword researchers, and content creators and web designers who will implement these techniques and more, to get your business flying up the search engine pages in Google and Bing.
Want to increase your search visibility online? To find out how we can help, contact Imagefix today on 01525 715608
