7 Basic SEO Tips To Consider When Optimising Your Site

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7 Basic SEO Tips To Consider When Optimising Your Site

 

Basic search engine optimisation is essential for any website. SEO will help your website to be found within the search engines through keywords relating to your business.

Here are 7 basic SEO tips that every website should consider:

1) What are the search engines looking for?

Search engines refer users to websites and content that they see is most relevant to what the user is looking for but how do the search engines determine relevance?

  • Content: is determined by the text on the page, the titles and descriptions that are given.
  • Performance: determined by the speed of the site and if it works properly (e.g. the links work).
  • User experience: How does it site look? How easy is it to navigate? Does it look trustworthy? Does it have a high bounce rate?
  • Authority: Do other sites use your website as a reference or quote information within your website? Does your website get a lot of likes on Facebook or followers on Twitter?

2) What the search engines aren’t looking for?

Search engines have to index a lot of data so if you are performing shady tactics trying to trick them into ranking you higher, the chances are you are going to hurt yourself in the long run. What not to do:

  • Poor user experience: Make it easy for the user to get around your website. For example too many links could make it difficult for the user to find what they are looking for which will increase the bounce rate. Review your analytics to see how high your bounce rate is, if it’s 80% or higher you are doing something wrong.
  • Keyword stuffing: don’t overuse the keywords you are trying to optimise for.
  • Buying links: buying links will get you nowhere these days and come with some heavy penalisations.

3) Know your business model

This may seem obvious but you would be surprised how many people don’t sit down and focus on what their main goals are for their website. Here are some questions you need to ask yourself:

  • What do you want to gain from your website?
  • What are your goals?
  • What defines a conversion for you?
  • Who is your target audience?
  • How will you get people onto your site?

By asking yourself these type of questions will help you build a better website.

4) Consistence with domain names

Your domain names are the foundation of your website. Here are some of the best practices for naming domains:

  • Keywords in URLs - 
    Having keywords within your domains will help you rank as it shows the search engines the importance of the keyword.
  • Redirect your domains –
    If your website URL is www.example.com, but you type in example.com (without www), if it doesn’t redirect you to www.example.com then that means they are actually two separate web pages. 
    The search engines will also see it that way, this will affect your SEO badly as it will dilute your inbound links as well as be classed as duplicate content by the search engines. 
  • Be consistent 
    All your URLs should keep the same pattern to make it easier for the search engines to index them. For example if your sub domain is www.example.com/estate-agents-in-london than all your sub domains should follow suit using the hyphen (-) to break apart the words.

5) Optimise for multi-channels

Your keyword strategy should not only be important to implement on-site but should extend to other off-site platforms, which is why you should also be thinking about multi-channel optimisation. You should consider these platforms:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google Plus
  • LinkedIn
  • Email

Being consistent with keyword phrases across your platforms will not only help your branding efforts but also help the user identify what you do quickly.

6) Optimise for all devices

Mobile and tablet optimisation is extremely important these days. Huge amounts of your traffic will come from these types of devices so be sure that your website looks good on any device.

7) Focus on tags and the Meta descriptions

Every page on your website should include a relevant title tag and Meta description.

  • Title tags are what the search engines consider the most important piece of content on your page so be sure to include your keywords within them.
  • The Meta description should be unique to the page, giving a short description of what the page has to offer.

Try to use both the title tag and Meta description as a sort of advert, try to entice the reader with them to make the page more appealing.