Have you just created a website? Now you just need to get people involved. To make your website one of the top results on search engines like Google and Bing, you need to know a few things about search engine optimization or SEO.
With so many websites on the web today and new ones being created every day, there is no guarantee that your website will rank #1 on Google. However, there are many things you can do to increase the chances of your website appearing on Google and ranking well.
Here you are 10 Tips to improve your SEO and get you ranking:
- Select the correct URL
- Create a title and description for each page
- Use anchor text
- Add alt text to all images
- Specify the correct headings for the structure of your site
- Create quality content
- Do keyword research
- Prefer active indexing
- Create effective external links
- Track, report and improve
1- Select the correct URL
Before your site is published, you need to give it a name. This is also called your domain name. This is the address that visitors enter to find your site. Like a giant sign above a storefront, it’s one of the first things visitors see when they land on your website. So it’s also the first place Google learns what your site is about and decides how to rank it. An ideal domain would include your business name and perhaps one or two keywords related to your business.
SEO tip: Make sure all page URLs are clean and clear. That means no special characters, no hashtags and no page IDs.
2- Create a unique title and description for each page
Did you know that you can write a unique title and description for each page on your website? These short words accurately and clearly describe your company. Ideally, these would be a mix of keywords and phrases. Have you ever hovered over a browser tab? The sentence that appears under the mouse is the page title tag. Although descriptions are not visible on your page, they are important for search engines to understand what your site and pages are about.
SEO tip: When your website appears on search results pages, web surfers will read your title and description to understand what your website is about and decide whether to view it.
3- Use anchor text
When writing text for your website, think about where you can use anchor text on your website. Anchor text is clickable text on a hyperlink that allows visitors to go directly to another page on your website or anywhere on the Internet.
Effective anchor text should be used to help users navigate your site and find what they are looking for. It should also include keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business.
SEO Tip: Anchor text is a great way to improve SEO, but keep in mind that too many links or anchors won’t really help your readers and can raise some red flags with Google.
4- Add alt text to all images
To understand what is shown in an image or graphic, search engines look for the “full text,” a short written description (no more than a few words) of each image on a website. When writing your alt text, be sure to describe exactly what is in the image, but try to include your business name or some keywords related to your business as well.
SEO Tip: You don’t need to write alt text only for functional or design-related images, such as background images that are just shapes. If the image has nothing to do with the topic of your site, you can skip the alt text.
5- Get your site architecture the right names
Every page on your website should have a title, subheading, etc. When search engines crawl your site, they will understand your content better if you use the correct text hierarchy. The most relevant part is the page title, which should be defined as H1 (in a text editor). H1s must describe the content of the page and no more than one H1 per page. page. Choose your title carefully and don’t forget to include the most important keywords. In the heading hierarchy, H1 is followed by H2, H3, etc.
SEO Tip: The clearer your text structure is, the easier it will be for search engines to digest your website content.
6- Create quality content
Creating good content is one way to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and get more pages on your site for more search terms. For many businesses, this may involve building a blog as part of their SEO and wider marketing strategy, but it can also mean simply ensuring that your website, product pages and other website pages are compliant with Google’s E-A-T. In 2018 Google incorporated the concept of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority and Trust) into its search quality assessment guidelines. It’s not clear exactly how Google measures E-A-T pages, and it likely won’t be forever. But when you’re creating content to be rated, make sure you know what you’re talking about, can back it up, and can trust users to make decisions.
SEO Tip: Get experts to write your content whenever possible – If you’re writing about a business topic, make sure you have at least one person who understands the world of business contributing to your writing.
7- Do keyword research
If you don’t target your keywords, your site won’t rank. Any SEO optimization you do on your page (whether it’s your chosen URL title or your chosen H1 or meta title) should have one or more target keywords to focus on.
When choosing keywords to target, the first thing you need to understand is the intent of the term. When users search using this keyword, what does Google think they are searching for? For example, someone searching for “SEO tips” is looking for informative content – perhaps a blog post. Therefore, when choosing this keyword, the best way is to write a blog post. Search engines, on the other hand, think that people who search for “SEO agency” are looking for SEO agency services or product pages. Its purpose is commercial. Don’t post a blog here – it won’t rank.
Keyword research can also help you understand how competitive your keywords are. Even if your initial investigation suggests it has blogging intentions, take a closer look at its blogging rankings. If they are well-established blogs with a ranking history, many pages of content, and a big company name behind them, you can consider it a potentially competitive SERP position.
SEO Tip: Choose the right keyword research tool that not only helps you with keyword research but also helps you analyze your competitors. If you’re looking for tools to get you started, we like Semrush and Ahrefs. They can also be used for local SEO research.
8- Prefer active indexing
Once your website is indexable (once you have connected it to Google Search Console and submitted your sitemap to the search engine), the next step is to ensure that the priority pages of your website are indexed. The web is filled with more sites and pages than anyone can count – if you want your priority pages to be indexed, you need to do something to make it clear to the search engines exactly what those important pages are.
Another part is leveraging your social profile links – whether that’s automatically sharing your website content on social platforms, requesting local quotes or signing up for online directories.
SEO tip: Make sure your website displays the right content so both search engines and users know what it is. Depending on the size of your site, this can be difficult, but if done right, it can have an incredible impact on your organic growth.
9- Create effective external links
External links are important. High quality backlinks from strong domains send a strong signal to Google that your content is worth ranking for. Think of it as a vote of confidence for your page, because Google will see it and want to reward you.
Good backlinks aren’t easy to come by and you have a lot to offer to get your content shared and distributed through quality sources. You need to gain the trust of publications or a reputable PR source.
SEO Tip: Original content is more likely to be shared, adopted, and get reputable backlinks.
10- Tracking, Reporting and Improvement
Perhaps the best SEO advice we can give is that SEO is not a sprint, but a marathon. Success is often the result of months of hard work, constantly updating and optimizing content while improving internal links and technical SEO fixes.
To make sure these efforts pay off and show you how you’re hitting your KPIs, make ranking and organic traffic tracking an integral part of your SEO reporting workflow. To do this, make the main website analysis tools – Google Search Console, Google Analytics and various other keyword tracking tools – your best friends.
These tools help you understand if you are ranking for your target keywords (or new keywords) and how much traffic you are getting as a result of ranking.
SEO Tip: Be prepared to react quickly to rank changes and traffic drops, pay attention to Google algorithm updates and plan accordingly.