Recently we’ve been asked to speak at quite a few events about Boosting Search Engine Optimisation, so we thought we’d share a blog with our Top Tips for On-Site SEO.
To have a good SEO strategy you have to have a combination of On-Site (your actual website) and Off-Site SEO – DigiEnable successfully boosts our clients sales leads with these, is this on your radar too?
Long gone are the days that you can ignore SEO. With over 73% of business website traffic coming from natural “organic” SEO, it’s time to put it in your strategy.
Keywords, Keyphrases, Keyboards
First off, before you start editing content on your website, do your research. Check out what you and your competitors are being found via, what words people are currently typing into their keyboards to find you on search engines, and what potential audiences are you missing out on at the moment. We spend a lot of time researching when we start working with a new SEO client, as this is SUPER important. If no one is actually typing those phrases or words into Google or another search engine, then you’ll only have limited success with people finding you with those terms.
Once you’ve done your research – or we’ve done it for you – you’ll have some good quality words or phrases that have a good potential – if you’re doing this for yourself we recommend a combination of 3-10 keywords or keyphrases to start with. Stick these on a Post-It Note (we love these!) and stick it next to your keyboard. Then the next time you write or edit content on your site, make sure those words feature in there somewhere.
“But where?” we hear you cry, that’s our next tip…
Website tweaks
Sometimes the simplest tweaks on your website can make a difference. When you or your website designer first built your website, you might have ignored a few of those information boxes, you’ll sort that out later, or never really knew what the functions did, so now is the time to go check out these elements!
File names – When we take a photo with our smart devices, it normally names the files something like DSC00654.jpg – this is not going to help you be found on Google the way you’d like. If before you upload the image to your website you name it something like – SEO Top Tips – DigiEnable Traffic Services.jpg – you are not only making it easier to find that image in future should you wish to use it again, but you are adding in vital keywords people could be searching for online.
Alt Tags – These are primarily used for visual impaired people who use screen readers to read out webpages, then when it gets to an image, the alt tag is read out instead of the word – if you fill these in with helpful descriptions of the corresponding image, this will help your visitors with access needs understand your content more. In turn the search engines see you as a helpful, accessible website and they are more likely to put you higher up the rankings, than your competitors who are not doing this. Alt tags are usually found next to the image details when you upload an image, or can be found to edit, via your image library.
Page Titles – For each website page you want to be filling in a title with relevant words, so your visitor knows what information they are going to find on that particular page. Giving pages titles like “home” or “page 3” are not helpful for your user, and won’t help you be found in the search engines either. Once you have mastered this, check out your Page Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions too, these will also help with your SEO boosting.
These elements will help you get started in optimising your website, as you’ll probably guess, these options are hidden behind your “backend” or login settings, but if you keep filling these in – and in a logical keyword focussed way – you’ll see an increase in your search rankings.
Look from their eyes
As you’re writing your content, you should be thinking about including your top keywords, optimising your pages for SEO, but also thinking how your clients – or maybe more importantly – your potential clients – are reading and engaging with your content. It’s useful to get other people to test your website and get them to feedback on it’s effectiveness and ease of use.
Mobilegeddon – Mobile Friendly?
If you get others to test your website, you’ll find some really good feedback – if you can get them to also use different devices to test too, bonus.
Is your website mobile compatible? Now mobile use has overtaken desktop use globally, it’s time to make sure a range of devices can access your website – and that the experience is good. The number of times we goto a website only to find the menus hard to access or there’s a floating advert you can’t click out of, is scarier than you’d think. Google and other search engines have Mobile Friendliness as one of their deciding factors on rankings – especially for mobile users – so to keep your SEO as high up the rankings are possible, make sure you’re offering a good environment online for all.
Content, Content, Content
Another aspect search engines look at when ranking your website is “good quality regular content”. It’s now not enough just to have a website that’s a static shop window. You need a way to share regular content on your site. A good example of this would be starting a blog. 94% of B2B buyers research their purchases online, so if you can be there at their research stage, offering useful, helpful content that makes you the “go-to” person or organisation, then when they’re ready to make that purchase you’re more likely to be at the front of their mind.
These are some starter points that are definitely worth checking to see if you’re using them, and if they’re optimised as well as they could be.
If you’d like to talk to DigiEnable about what services we could offer to help you get more leads out of your website, please do feel free to contact us at Info@DigiEnable.co.uk