10 Tips For SEO

10 Quick Tips for SEO

Posted by Lucy Tew 18/03/2018.

SEO - or Seach Engine Optimisations can be scary and difficult to navigate, its ever changing and is hard to pinpoint the exact reason your site is not on the top of the search results in google. But in the following ramblings are 10 solid tips that search engines form their alogrithms around. So they will always improve your rating no matter what else changes.

1. Key Words

Repatition is key (Get it? Get it? no just me? ok). But really, pick 10 key words that are most imporatant to your business and repeat on your website where ever you can (as long as it actually makes sense in the sentance). Say you are a hair dresser, maybe you are based out of Nottingham. Your key words might look like the following:
Hair Dressers Nottingham, Hair Extentions Nottingham, Beauty Salon Nottingham, Nails Nottingham, Mens Hair Nottingham.

The more that you talk about these in your text on your site the more likely you will apear when these terms are searched for.

2. Competitors

What are your competitiors doing that your not? Updating pages constantly? Using more keywords in their site maps?
One of the best things you can do is see what they are doing, where they rank in the google serach.

If they have a higher ranking than you then there is something more that you can be doing that they have (at the moment) done better than you. I'm not saying out right copy what they are doing but you could learn something by looking at their site a bit closer than you probably do at the moment.

3. Links!

Links back to your website or creatively called "backlinks" are one way that google uses to see how popular your website is. So create content that people will want to share on facebook. Or buddy up with your friend and agree to share their website in return for them to share your site.

You will be surpirsed how easy this can be, it just takes some time to build the links. But its extremely worth your while

4. Optimize your Tile and Meta Tags

Sound like a load of rubbish? Well its not as complicated as it sounds, Meta tags are put into code to describe the content and well the title is exactly what it sounds like - the page title. They don't appear on the page but tell search engines what the page is about.
By utalising these, they will sometimes be shown in the google search results so can entice users into clicking onto your website.

5. Title and Alt Attributes

Title attributes let a search engine (and your customers) know where the link is going to take them. They're not going to click on a link that they don't know where it takes them are they?

It is also a w3c standard for making the page accesible to blind customers as they can use screen readers which will read out the tilte and alt attributes to let them know what is on the page.

Alt attributes are basically decriptors so that search engines know what the image is.

6. Tell Search Engines What to Look At

By creating something called a robot.txt file, you can tell google what to look at on your website. This is particularly important as if there is a given page that you don't want google to index then you can state this in the robot.txt file. Or alternatively you can say, go index everything!

7. Generate and Submit Site Maps

Site Maps are exactly what they are, they basically create a link to every page within the website. Making it easy for web crawlers find all the content on your website. These usually come in a xml format which is the standard across the board for search engines but there are plenty of tools that can create theses.

By submiting them directly to search engines this will speed up the process of them indexing all of these pages naturally. Think of it as jumping the queue for little people to look and find content on your site.

8. Validate your Source Code

Broken links and incorrect code will affect your search rankings. But running your source code through a validator you will be able to see the places in your code that needs changing or fixing.

Broken links are where they don't lead anywhere which you can imagine will affect your customers experience using your site. After all google is trying to do is provide the best site for their customers.

9. Update

By updating your site regualarly you are telling google that the site is active. Creating a blog page this is the perfect way to, not only keep adding to your site but also let your customers know what you are up too.

10. SSL Certificate

One of the latest changes thatis still yet to come is that Google is going to start looking at which sites have a valid SSL certificates. They will then be showing these as a prefernce over those sites without them. SSL Certifictates encrypt the connection between your cusotmers and the server that they are being hosted on. For more information about SSL certificates click on the link below.

More about SSL Certificates

Want to Know More?

Then drop us and email and we are always happy to give any advice!
SEO is forever changing, it's hard to stay on top which is why it needs to be forever kept an eye on. Most people don't have a clue where to start or the time to learn about it, which we don't blame you for! You're too busy looking after your business, which is why we can take over and do the hard work for you. You just have to deal with the business that it brings in! Click below to learn more about out SEO pacakge.

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