One of the many aspects of marketing that confuses lots of business owners who have websites is search engine optimisation aka SEO. SEO is the means of optimising ranking factors related to your website so that Google moves your website’s ranking upwards, and ideally to page #1 of their search results.
The benefit of doing so is that the amount of organic traffic that you can acquire by being on page #1, and especially the top 3 positions of that page, is way more than you could ever hope to achieve if ranked on any other page. Data shows that for any given search term the traffic generated from page #1 is 95% of the total, with just 5% for all the other pages, so you can see why being on page #1 is essential.
You can gain first-page rankings in several ways and the option many business owners opt for is hiring an SEO agency who have experts in optimising websites for higher rankings. Their expertise is considerable, however, they do not work for nothing, and not every business is currently able to cover those fees, even if they know it would massively increase the traffic to and revenue from their website.
If you are in a similar position, it does not mean you cannot rank on page #1, it just means you have to do much of the SEO yourself. Some of it is straightforward, so if you want to get started, here are 10 SEO tips to improve your website’s rankings.
SEO Tip #1 – Conduct Keyword Research: Determine the keywords you aim to rank for by conducting keyword research. This highlights less competitive keywords which you can rank for quickly and also more difficult keywords which will take longer.
SEO Tip #2 – Ensure All Content Is Unique, Interesting, And Relevant: By following this tip and applying it to all existing and future content, you will see positive results. According to SEO experts ‘Content Is King’, so ensure that yours is outstanding.
SEO Tip #3 – Each Post’s URL Should Include Your Keywords: When you create a blog post or a page you also create its URL, and in doing so you should ensure that one or more of your keywords is part of that URL.
SEO Tip #4 – Vary Your Content Types: Too many websites are ‘textfests’ as all that is there is written content. Give visitors a better experience by mixing up content types and publishing audio/visual content too.
SEO Tip #5 – Title Tags Should Include Your Main Keyword: Every website page has a title, which is what you can see on the browser tab when the page is loaded. For SEO purposes always include your main keywords in that title.
SEO Tip #6 – Ensure Content On Category Pages Is High Quality: Your website content should be ‘categorised’ to help visitors navigate your site. On the main category pages, you should make especially sure that the content published there is top quality.
SEO Tip #7 – Link Out As Well As Link In: Backlinks from other websites play a crucial role in SEO. However, what is less known is that Google also likes to see websites linking out too, so create links out to high-authority websites.
SEO Tip #8 – Create An Awesome Meta Description: The meta description is the snippet of text you see below each link on pages of search results. To optimise yours make sure that your meta description contains keywords, and the text promotes your website.
SEO Tip #9 – Ensure It Is Easy To Share Your Content: The more people online who see your content the bigger the boost to your SEO. To further that aim, make it easy for visitors to share your content by having share buttons on every website page.
SEO Tip #10 – Set Up Analytics Tools: This is more technical but possible for business owners to accomplish. Here you are setting up webmaster tools that analyse your website’s rankings so that you can establish how to optimise it further.