By Lianne Tadd
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of enhancing a website through best practice techniques to ensure that the pages rank well on search results. With more businesses looking to improve their online presence we would like to share some of our SEO top tips.
- Know Your Keywords
Keywords are the words (or phrases) that describe your business and are what people will type into a search engines to find you. The first step towards your SEO strategy is to identify your keywords.
TOP TIP: Try using Google Keyword Planner and also looking at your competitors sites for keyword ideas.
Your keyword strategy should contain a mixture of the following:
- One word phrases – These are often difficult to rank competitively for, for example; shoes, clothes, houses, accountant etc.
- Two to three word phrase – these are slightly easier to rank for however due to competition from other websites the probability of converting users into customers remains low.
- Long tail keywords – these are more descriptive phrases that often lead to a higher amount of conversions.
- Optimised Title Tag
Title tags appear on search engine results as the headline above the description of the result. Search engines also crawl title tags for information as to what the web page is about.
TOP TIP: Ensure that your keywords are utilised in your title tag and that it gives a clear description of your business.
e.g. Digital Marketing Agency | Surrey | Red Ant Solutions
- Enticing Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are a short summary of the content of your web page and appear below the title tag on search results. Although it is believed that search engines do not crawl meta descriptions for information, they are still an important tool for driving traffic to your site by giving an enticing and directive summary of the subject of your page.
TOP TIP: Include a call to action such as, “call us today” or “find out more” to generate interest and drive future customers to your site.
- Backlinks Build Trust
A backlink is created when one website links to another. Google’s priority is to promote trustworthy and relevant websites and backlinking is seen as a “vote of trust” for the page it is directing its visitors to.
TOP TIP: The key to gaining natural backlinks is to ensure that you have engaging, interesting content, that people will want to link to.
- Content is King
Since the Panda update was launched by Google in 2011, websites with low quality, thin or duplicate content have been subject to penalties. Content should be relevant, engaging, informative and contain keywords. Your heading structure should also include keywords that describe the content of the page.
TOP TIP: When looking for new content ideas, type into google your keyword plus either “how”, “why” or “when”. This will show you popular questions. If you believe that you can write better and more informative content than what is already available on the search then they can become great future blog posts.
SEO is a very indepth subject, but we hope that with the tips that we have given here, you will be able to get your website off to a good start and start climbing those all-important page ranks and drive more traffic to your site.
Lianne Tadd is digital marketing executive at Red Ant Solutions