Basic Search Engine Optimisation For Your Blog Or Website
Hitting the top spot on Google’s search results page sure is a challenge…
For bloggers and website owners alike search engine optimisation – or SEO as it’s better known – can be a website’s Achilles heel. Pleasing the guys at Google is almost an art form, what with so many different iterations of their elusive search results algorithm doing the rounds. We recently outlined what not to do when tackling SEO, but what are the right things to be looking at?
Keywords
When crafting the content for your website or blog, you should be aware that it is not only built to impress your potential customers, but also to impress Google and other search engines. Keywords are a strong indicator of how well crafted your content is; if you are discussing topics relevant to your industry and that can answer the questions of the searchers of the internet, then you’ll strike SEO gold. For example, your budget online jewellery shop should include content around keywords such as “online jeweller”, “cheap jewellery online” and “jewellery gifts”. And why not add a blog section to your site to provide useful information for your site visitors? As we mentioned above, if you’re answering the questions of the searchers, you’ll receive a search engine optimisation boost.
Navigation
Your website looks different to your site visitors than it does to Google and other search engines. Their search engine ranking “crawlers” quite literally crawl through your site, ranking the functionality and ease of use as well as the content. For this reason your website building strategy should be in check; your site should be easily navigable to all website visitors. For an ecommerce site, checkout options must be included and easily located on all selling pages, and the customer journey should be simple and without too many steps. Once your sitemap starts to get too complex Google will mark you down in their search engine ranking – particularly for pages that are harder to reach – as your site will be less accessible to visitors.
Quality over quantity
The above phrase seems to be a particular favourite for Google’s algorithm wizards; they apply this to every area of their website ranking process. There are no aspects of your website that you will be rewarded for overcrowding; less is always more when it comes to your business website. This means that those all-important keywords have to be optimised as part of well crafted, quality content that is informative and engaging. The quality of your website’s structure will be determined by the ease with which site visitors can locate the pages they’re looking for, regardless of which page that information can be found on.
Website hosting
As you can see from the above, the way your website is managed behind the scenes is just as important for search engine optimisation as the content on-screen. In today’s world, online users are looking for instant information; if your website takes longer than two seconds to load they are actually likely to click away and find a faster website to get their information. Remember: there are countless websites out there providing similar information, services and products to yours. A robust dedicated server hosting solution from UK2 will provide you with the ultimate in power, control and resources for your website. With high-bandwidth packages available and a fully dedicated machine of storage and power, dedicated hosting will make sure your site is served without any delays. Check out UK2’s dedicated server options here.
To get started with your search engine optimisation efforts you can first scan your site for free using our Website SEO Guru tool. Simply click here and enter your URL into the software; you’ll receive an insightful SEO report within minutes.