Keywords
A keyword is a word or phrase that the searcher will enter into the search engine, sometimes known as ‘search queries’. We need to understand what people will be searching for to be able to optimise your website accordingly. Using keywords and phrases that people will be searching for in your website content will help your website to rank higher in search results.
There are many free tools which can help with researching keywords too. Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner are a great place to start and will help you find search volumes and related keywords which you can use.
User Experience
One of the most important things, as far as the search engines are concerned is user experience. At the end of the day, the search engines want to serve their users with the best and most accurate results for what they are searching for. So, if you are optimising your webpage with a certain keyword or phrase, think hard about providing quality, valuable content for the viewer related to that keyword.
Other aspects to think about for user experience are things like load time of the page, which could cause the viewer to bounce off your website and look elsewhere.
On Page Optimisation
Other than the actual content of the page, there are plenty more things you can do on each page of your website. Sticking with your keywords that you have researched, make sure you have title tags which clearly define what the page is about, including keywords if possible. The URL for the page should also clearly show the hierarchy of the page, so search engines and searchers can quickly see what the page is about. You should also make sure that the alt text on images is filled out and includes your keywords if possible.
Link building
Links between pages allow what the search engines call ‘bots’ to crawl between sites and assess how they should rank, so the more links to the page, the easier it is for the bots to find and index your website. But that doesn’t mean to say you should get as many links as you possibly can to it. The quality of the links is also important. Building quality external links through blog collaborations, directory listings or when you attend events are extremely valuable and will help your website in terms of SEO.
Internal links between pages on your own website are good for SEO too, as it makes it easier for viewers and bots alike to navigate around your site and between pages.
So, that is a very brief overview of a few things that you can do with your website to help your search engine ranking, but there is so much more. SEO is built over time and not something that is just switched on. There are many more things that can be done which we will go through in later blog articles, from structured data, meta tags and rank authority.
If you would like more information or help with SEO on your website, please get in touch through the details on the contact page.
