Easy and actionable seo techniques for your website

Search engine optimisation, more commonly known as SEO, is the digital marketing technique of optimising your website to build higher search rankings. This will in turn increase your visitor numbers which should ultimately lead to increase sales or customer enquiries.

Like all aspects of digital marketing, SEO is constantly evolving but there are fundamental principles you can do now to provide the foundations of a wider campaign.

Publish your business on Google My Business & Bing Places

Depending on the type of business you run the chances are you’ll have a physical location, be it an office or a shop (it could even be your house). If so, you can easily take advantage of this and get your business appearing on Google Maps.

Major search engines are now prioritising local businesses over national ones for many different search terms and claiming your business location tells them you exist and where you are. You’ll also provide a means for your customers to leave you reviews and show alongside your local competitors in local results.

You can either register or claim your business on Google My Business & Bing Places.

H1 & H2 Tags

Using heading tags within your HTML is all part of a basic SEO page structure which should present on every page of your website. The most important of these is <h1>, which should be your main page heading and there should be a <h1> (and only one) on every page. The content of your <h1> should be readable but also contain your main target keywords for the page.

Your sub-headings should then take the structure of <h2> <h3> <h4> etc, to create a top-down content hierarchy. Ideally your pages should have 2 or 3 <h2>, and then further sections within them use the lower down titles.

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Enticing and Keyword Rich Page Titles & Meta Descriptions

Your page title tags and meta descriptions are a highly effective search engine optimisation tool and are really easy to implement. Both these content snippets are the pieces of information that show in search engines where your pages appear.

In recent years their influence on rankings has reduced, but they are certainly still vital in enticing clicks through to your website, which certainly is an important ranking factor.

Both should include your target keywords, but they should remain friendly to read while also enticing the user to click. In addition, every page and blog on your website should have a unique page title and meta description.

Image Alt Tags

Search engine bots continuously scour the internet to index websites and new pages in order to show them in search results. The use of imagery is vital to the look and feel of your website, but search engines can’t actually see them, just that there could be an image there.

What you need to do is tell them what each image is of, this way it’s more likely your images will show in image search results. This is done using Alt tags and is a simple technique to further boost your content optimisation.

Add Quality Content

When it comes to search rankings your content is king. Every one of your pages should contain relevant, unique and well written content that is focused around your services and target keywords.

A blog is a perfect place to show off your industry knowledge and further boost your search engine visibility. Adding regular blog posts gives you a wealth of content to share with your audience and fresh content for search engines to index.

All content you create should 100% unique (i.e. not copied from elsewhere) and written for readers first and search engines second. All well written blog created by an industry authority will naturally contain all relevant keywords and phrases. Creating poor quality content will do your website far more long term damage than any short term gain.

Be Patient

The first stage to high search rankings is the right on-page optimisation techniques. However, don’t expect your rankings to increase over night, SEO is a long term marketing strategy. Plus, SEO never stops evolving and we never stop learning.

If you’d like any advice of any part of your digital marketing or website development you’re in the right place.