SEO for Beginners
Search Engine Optimisation is basically the science to get your website seen. With over 1 billion live websites in the internet, what are the chances your site will be found?
For any online business or blog, being found through search engine searches is all part of generating new business and growing subscriber bases. The more traffic a website has, the higher the chances are of monetising it. To stand a chance in our online digital ocean, we need to make sure that our website is SEO optimised as much as possible.
Here are our top tips on SEO optimisation for a website:
1. Keyword Research
Before doing anything else, you need to determine for what kind of searches you wish your website to be found. This involves creating a list of keywords relevant to your services. Once you have these in mind, using a keyword tool can help you investigate which keywords have enough monthly searches to be useful and also how competitive a given term is. You can then choose the right keywords with a realistic level of competition.
2. Site Optimisation
Now that you have chosen your keywords, your website needs to be structured in a search engine friendly way. Links need to be coherent and a good xml sitemap submitted to Google will go a long way. Also, including relevant keywords within your URLs will help improve website rankings. Make sure there are no broken links and that there is no unnecessary duplication of pages and content.
3. Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions and title tags are the invisible information carriers for search engine bots crawling your website. The meta tags contain information on keywords, what a given page is about and also represents the text snippet that appears on search result listings. Title tags containing keywords will also add relevance. The more relevant a page is to a given search, the higher it will rank. And once your page shows up on a search, you will want the text snippet to entice users to click on the link.
4. Links
One of the factors search engines consider when ranking your website is the quality and number of recognised websites linking back to yours. The more authoritative the website linking to yours is, the more credible your site appears to search engines. But beware, backhanded creation of links which are deemed irrelevant to your website’s content can cause a suspension of your domain name or heavy ranking penalisation.
5. Google Updates
Let’s face it, Google is the number one search engine we all wish to rank highly on. So as Google’s algorithm and rules change, it is important to keep up with them and apply changes to your website. For example, pop-ups on mobile website versions will cause damage to your rankings now. As a rule of thumb, if you structure your website with genuine user experience in mind, your website should be quite resilient.
6. Content Is King
Last but definitely not least is website content. No matter how technically superb your site may be, if your content is boring, unoriginal or not even relevant to your site, the search engines will not rank you highly. Creating new and interesting content which also really satisfies a given search is the way forward. ‘How to’ URLs are a good example of pages which rank better than others, as they tend to provide answers to questions.