Thanks for visiting our blog. In this post we are going to be talking through the basics of SEO and how you can improve your website. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is all about getting your website to show as high as possible in the Google search results for a given keyword. There are many techniques and tricks to SEO, and people have different opinions on what works and what doesn’t. You could potentially spend thousands of pounds optimising your site but these tips are great to build a good foundation for your website and start the ball rolling. The best thing is that you can do all of the points below yourself fairly easily.
The first and most important thing is having good quality, relevant content which is informative. Without good content on your website you don’t have anything to back up the optimisation and will not help rank on Google. When writing text for your website think, what keyword you want to show on Google for and what do you want to get across to the visitor? Don’t just type content for the sake of it. Make sure it is relevant, well written English and try to keep it simple and to the point. Also make sure that you talk about the subject you want to optimise your page for, so if you want your website to show on Google for the search term “Plumber in Essex” make sure that in your content you say that you are a plumber in Essex. It may sound basic but getting your content right is the main contributing factor to success and is important for the tips below to work.
After you’ve written your page content and are happy with it you want to set up a title, keywords and description. The title is the first thing someone sees on Google (the blue underlined text on a Google result) so it’s important that this is engaging and shouts ‘click me’ to potential visitors. The title should basically say what the page is about but shouldn’t be too long, but also not too short, it’s about getting it just right. For example, the title “Great quality – durable work boots” would be a lot better than the title “Work boots”, and you also need to make sure that your title includes the search term you are optimising for. That’s also where keywords come in; this is a list of keywords and phrases (all separated by commas) for which you want your website to show in Google search results. For example, a car sales company in Scotland could have “Car sales Scotland, cars for sale in Scotland, new car Scotland” etc. Then the page description should describe what the page is about but again shouldn’t be too long and should just summarise what the page is about. This shows on the Google search listings too so make sure it is engaging. Adding these to your website should be easy depending on the type of site you have. Most website platforms like WordPress include SEO plug-ins which allow you to add these to a webpage, and most CMS systems should have the functionality to add titles, keywords and descriptions. If you are in any doubt about how to do it, contact your website provider and they should be able to help.
Next, add images to the page. It makes your content engaging to visitors as well as improving SEO. On your images make sure you add Alt text. This is similar to the page description we spoke about above, but in this case is telling Google what the image is. Again this is really simple, just write what you see in the image and what you want to optimise for. So for example, if it is a picture of your flower shop in Essex put the Alt tag as “Flower shop in Essex”. Again this is a feature in most website CMS platforms.
Long tail keywords are by far the best keywords to use in terms of conversion, but you are limiting yourself in terms of wider keywords which could potentially be seen by more people but have a lower conversion. For example, a long tail keyword would be “Woman’s white Nike trainers”, and a similar short tail keyword would be “Woman’s trainers”. So for example, the short keyword would show up a lot more often in search results but could receive less conversion because someone might be looking for a certain type of white trainers. Compared to the long term keyword if someone is looking for that certain thing when your result shows up then the likelihood of someone clicking on your link is a lot higher as your keyword exactly matches what they are searching for, but you would expect to have a lot less potential searches on it, but a higher click rate.
Social media also contributes to SEO. Think of it this way; the more pages on different websites that are related to your site, the better perceived your site will be by the likes of Google. So, if you have a profile on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram it can drastically improve your website rankings. After setting the profiles up make sure you link to them from your website in order for it to improve SEO.
SEO is a continuous thing. Don’t think you can just write a good page of content with title, keywords and description then leave it. Even if a webpage does go to page 1 on Google and stays there, it is not guaranteed to stay there forever. Other competitors are constantly trying to out-do your web rankings on Google, so SEO is about constantly monitoring your rankings and fine tuning your approach. We personally recommend checking your rankings every week. That way if you do notice your pages are dropping down the rankings on Google you can sort it quickly before they drop off completely and become irretrievable. You might just need to add some new keywords, or a different title structure. Try tweaking different settings and if they work then great but if not then go back to how it was before and try something different.
There is no set method for success but following the basics above is sure to be a good starting point to help increase your website’s position on Google. Good luck!
Don’t forget that as well as web design we also specialise in SEO so feel free to get in touch if you need any help or would like a quotation for helping to optimise your website on Google.
