Quick SEO Fixes

The SEO (search engine optimisation) of your website is important. It helps users find you on Google and other search engines by highlighting the quality of your content and its relevance to a given search. There are many different elements to creating a strong search engine optimised site. Many of these options can be implemented very quickly on your site to improve your ranking on the search results page.

A high ranking will then increase traffic to your site and improve your lead generation. Learn more about these quick SEO fixes in this blog post.

Why Is Optimising Your Website So Important?

Search engine optimisation should be one of your top priorities. Search engines can typically contribute up to 70% of the traffic to your website. The most common online sales path is also from organic searches. Therefore having a good SEO profile is important.

Optimising your website for search engines correctly can also prevent you from falling foul to a Google penalty. A Google penalty will automatically remove your website from the listings, which will seriously affect your flow of traffic.

If you are not familiar with the concept of SEO, here’s a short video we made that might help:

What Elements Make Up A Website’s SEO Footprint?

The SEO of a website is made up of many different elements, some of these are on-page and some are off-page. There are many areas which you can quickly update and receive an almost instant boost to your page ranking.

So what are these elements and how can you improve them?

Number One: Quality Content

A blog offering quality content for your readers on a regular basis should be your first step. Every blog post should contain a keyword which you would like search engines to rank you for. Ensure you are using a mixture of keyword variations, such as ‘create’, ‘creating’ and ‘created’ instead of just using one of those.

The way Google users search for solutions has also changed in recent years. Previously users would conduct a one or two word search. Now users are typing in searches in sentences. For example, previously a searcher might have used: “online marketing”, now they would use “how to make the most of my online marketing”.

Placing terms like this into your content will allow it to rank highly.

Number Two: URL Structure

The search engine bots who crawl your website, like to have readable URLs in which to index your pages. Therefore the best method is to ensure that your URLs don’t contain complex identifiers like www.mywebsite.com/34343?4354.html but instead are similar to www.mywebsite.com/welcome-to-my-blog.html.

This will be more readable to both your audience and the search engines, allowing it to be ranked better. Research has also shown that legible URL’s are clicked on more than those that are not.

Keep the page identifier to just four words long or less (i.e. welcome-to-my-website.html rather than welcome-to-my-website-it-is-the-best.html).

If you have a long page title, reduce the words to the four most important.

You should also separate the words in the string using hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_). Underscores are seen as one word, which is unreadable for a Google spider.

Number Three: Internal Linking

Having significant amounts of information within one article can make it difficult for your audience to read. Internal links can support your efforts to educate your audience. Creating text links within your content directing visitors to other pages can help your audience discover similar content without having to search for the information.

This also helps search engines index your website faster and more thoroughly.

When creating text links, use high value anchor text, such as a brand name or a description of the content being linked to. This helps the reader and the search engine identify the content.

Don’t overdo it though: you don’t want to use too many internal links within your content. Too many will make the page look spammy and Google will penalise you through their Panda and Penguin updates.

Number Four: Page Speeds

Google likes the webpages to be fast. It will give a lower rank to those sites which have a slow upload time. You can see how well your page is performing using the Page Speed Tool on Google Developers.

Speed is also important because your audience will not wait around for a page to load forever. If pages take too long to load, a significant amount of your potential visitors will click off and abandon your site.

Therefore taking steps to reduce the load time will help you gain a better visitor rate and significant rank jump.

Number Five: Social Media

Social media is becoming one of the biggest aspects of a website’s SEO. Bing uses the number of likes on Facebook to help determine rank and Google are implementing a system where the +1’s on their own social media platform are being incorporated into the page rank.

Twitter is also important as Google uses the network to discover new content quickly. Therefore, as soon as new content is made available, you should Tweet the content to your followers.

Another tip is to request shares from your audience to help increase the page rank contribution from various search engines.

Number Six: Use the H2 Heading Tag

Many website owners concentrate on their main heading; however your H2 headings are also really important when it comes to your SEO ranking. Your H2 headings help to break up the content, making it easier to read and for Google and other search engines to analyse.

It also supports SEO if you include your keyword in at least one of those H2 headings. To ensure best results, have an H2 heading every 3-4 paragraphs.

Conclusion

Search Engine Optimisation is an important aspect of your business’ marketing efforts. A good strategy will organically grow the number visitors who land upon your website. This in turn will generate leads, sales and revenue. However, there are a number of different elements which require investment to optimise, but once done, your business will benefit substantially.

Action Points:

• Have an overview of your website and see what SEO fixes you can make.
• Create a blog and post at least once a week.
• Check all your headings, URLs and internal links to make sure they are optimised.