Owning or running a business website these days just isn’t enough, things have gone way beyond that. And am sure you must have been hearing the buzz about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on the internet these days and you have probably even read about it. If you haven’t then please take a minute and read up about it on Wikipedia.
Now, assuming you have read the Wikipedia article and/or have gotten some basic knowledge of what SEO means, then, take a few more minutes to read up this quick guide for some easy to implement tips that I promise will get you started quickly on SEO and greatly improve your website ranking and traffic in no time.
First, I have listed the tips below:
1.Have a consistent address, phone number and name over the web
2.Mind the position you place your address on your website
3.Always publish quality contents
4.Don’t forget to update your contents
5.Focus on your Metadata and page titles
6.Tell us more about external links
7.ALT Tags are your friend
8.Do your Keywords research well, Don’t rush
9.Your website should never be too slow to load
10.SiteMaps will do you a lot of good
So, Let’s discuss them briefly;
1.Have a consistent address, phone number and name over the web
This is self explanatory enough, you should always make sure your physical company address, phone number and name remains the same in every occurrence or mention of you online.
You don’t want to confuse the search engine bots by having different phone numbers, address or name. Don’t do that.
2.Mind the position you place your address on your website
Some group of intelligent and experienced people (which am not part of) have discovered that it is most beneficial (for SEO purpose) to local businesses to place their business name, address and phone number (NAP) by the bottom right corner of their websites and can also have this NAP show up on every single webpage that belongs to the same website. This is believed to help search engine bots easily locate the NAP and re-establish the authenticity of your NAP.
3.Always publish quality contents
If any article/blog post isn’t making sense to you, am sure you would definitely closed the browser tab or visit another site that you find more interesting.
This means, people love the quality, educative, informative or entertaining contents and will probably spend more time on your website if you provide such stuffs there. No matter what your business is about, you should only and only post quality contents on it rather than stuffs that don’t relate to what you do or stuffs that your target audience will find repulsive.
4.Don’t forget to update your contents
All search engine bots believe that a website that gets updated content every now and then is alive and others that don’t get updated that much are dead.
Yes, i mean it.So, from now on try as much as possible to post some contents maybe once or twice a month rather than a year. And if you can’t go through the stress of thinking and finding content for your website updates, you can contact us at Web Solutions Dublin and we will take of everything for you.Sometimes you also want to just change some things on your business website like the look, the design and stuffs. All this counts as recognizable signals by search engines that your website is alive.
5.Focus on your Metadata and page titles
If you do not know what metadata is then just take some time to read up on it or just assume it has to do with your web pages’ title and some descriptions and keywords adjustable at the back-end of your website.
The only things you should worry about are:
– Make sure the titles you give your web pages carry some important keywords that are relevant to your business and search engines can use to find you when a user tries finding content that relate to your products or services.
– Meta-Description is that short article you get to read whenever you search for something online with search engines. Check the image below to understand better.
– Keyword metadata are those interesting phrases that you can assume people will search for on search engines and these phrases will match some of your products, services or content and this will prompt search engine websites to put your website on the SERP for such searches.
If you find it difficult to understand this part, you can either read up on each of the complicated words, contact an expert SEO guy to explain better to you or just simply ignore it and move to the next tips.
6.Tell us more about external links
Yes, I like this part a lot. Anytime you are posting a link to an external source from your website, please tell your audience exactly where the link will take them rather than just having a bunch of Click Here buttons or links everywhere. Let your audience be confident enough that the links they want to click will take them outside your website to an external source whose name you have specified or mentioned before the link itself. And trust me, search engine bots love this kind of thing too. They will rank you, better for doing this. Below is a simple two sentence illustration:
– To read more on my car brand Click here—— Bad
– To Read more on Wikipedia for this type of my car brand Click here— Good
7.ALT Tags are your friend
ALT Tags are the same as alternative text descriptions. They are simply the best way for you to name and more or less tag media files such as audio, videos and images which ordinarily search engine bots might never know what content these media files have inside.
By giving them the appropriate names through ALT Tags, you will make it easy for search engine bots to have an idea what these media files are about and they can now be provided to users that search for such keywords, or phrases that matches these alternative description text. These can get you more traffic to your website and help your ranking on SERPs.
8.Do your Keywords research well, Don’t rush
Try as much as possible to invest some time into understanding what Keyword research means and how much you need to pay a lot of attention and research carefully for them before you start running SEO campaigns.
If you don’t do your Keyword research properly and then just start ranking for irrelevant keywords, then you should expect no sensible improvement to your website traffic nor will you get better ranking on SERPs.
Pay for an expert to do it for you, or invest quality time into learning it. That’s my take.
9.Your website should never be too slow to load
Slow loading speed is the best way to kill your website ranking, loose your site visitors/potential customers, and make your website completely useless.
You should remove un-necesary stuffs that are sticking around your webpages and slowing down the overall load speed.
Compress high quality images with large file size into moderate quality with smaller file size.
You can also use tools like PingDom to get a breakdown of each element on your webpages and their respective load times.From this breakdown you can easily spot which elements have been slowing down your website load speed.
1o.SiteMaps will do you a lot of good
SiteMaps is an Xml file that contains all the links available on your website. It is very good and useful for search engines when trying to index your website.
The xml file is something you might not want to consider generating manually/by hand, rather you can search online for free or paid tools that can generate this SiteMaps.xml file from your website and then you can now go ahead and submit this generated xml file to search engines and expect that it will help them alot in indexing your website and in knowing well what you offer and the type of users they should redirect to you in the future.
Conclusively,
I will assume with this short guide, you now have a basic knowledge of what matters as regards improving your website SEO.
So, get to work. Put these things into the implementation or rather just contract your Website SEO out to an experienced company with a team of experts such as Web Solutions Dublin.
