Search Engine Optimising Your Website

SEO. Yet another acronym in the world of digital marketing. It stands Search Engine Optimisation and simply means that your website is geared up so that Google can find it. Every time a search is made in Google, little crawlers are sent out to find website that have earned their right to appear on the first page. How do they earn that right? Google looks at a couple of things to determine if your website is worthy of appearing at the top. Here’s some tips on how to search engine optimise your website.

Website Set Up

Make sure that your web developer has included or constructed the:

robots.txt: This file helps tell Google which pages of your website to search for (if someone has Googled for a product or service, that particular page of your website would be more relevant than your case studies for example)

XML sitemap: This helps Google easily consume the information on your website, so it can determine if it is relevant to the search.

HTTPS: make sure your website is secured with HTTPS (as opposed to HTTP)

Keywords, Titles and Meta Descriptions

Adding keywords to each page means that your page will be eligible to appear when someone searches for that keyword. In order to place keywords onto your web pages you’ll need to install a plugin (like SEO Yoast if you’re using WordPress). The plugin will allow you to add keywords and set an SEO title and Meta description. Ideally, the keyword should also appear in the URL string.

Content

With a technically sound coded website, the next step is to ensure that your website has useful, relevant, informative and well written copy. It’s recommended that you should have at least 500 words on informative pages on your website and at least 300 words for your blog. You’ll need to weave the keywords you’ve selected for that page into the content to improve the page’s SEO score.

Images and Backlinks

Images are ‘crawlable’ too. Label the file names of any images you upload to the website. Hyperlink words on your website page to help with SEO. Hyperlinking also helps direct people to more useful information, making for a good customer experience as it were.  If many people have hyperlinked your website, it means it is useful or popular.

Directories and Blogs

Placing your website as a listing on sites like Yellow Pages, Bing Places and Google My Business helps your SEO. So does blogging. Blogging is useful not only for educating and engaging with visitors, but it helps your Google ranking. This blog for example may appear when someone searches for ‘search engine optimising your website’ which has then brought a new user to our website.

Need to optimise your website? Get in touch with our team. We’re helping our clients get more traffic to their website and increase their leads. We’d love to hear from you!