By now you’ve probably heard the term ‘website optimisation’, you know you want to rank well in the search results, and want your users to have the best experience possible while browsing your website, but have no idea where to start.
As an agency, we understand the importance of optimising your website, it enables you to attract more relevant traffic to convert potential customers and ensures that your website is working exactly as it should.
What is SEO & Why is it Important?
Essentially, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of getting targeted traffic to a website from a search engines’ organic ranking. It is all about increasing a site ranking in the organic section of the search results. The better visibility your pages have in the search results, the more likely you are to attract potential and existing customers.
SEO is crucial to a business’s digital marketing strategy and typically a business’s primary source of digital traffic because users conduct trillions of searches each year, often with purchase intent.
How Search Engines Work
A search engine is a web-based tool that enables users to locate information on the web.
Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software that explores the web regularly to find sites and add them to their index.
Google works in three stages:
- Crawling: This is where Google searches the web looking for pages that are new or updated.
- Indexing: Google will then visit the pages that it has learned about from crawling, and analyses what the page is about.
- Results: Then when a user performs a search, Google will try to determine the highest quality results.
What You Need to Do/Best Practices
Now we know what website optimisation is and how search engines work, what are the SEO best practices you should be undertaking.
Keyword Rich Content
Did you know the location of your keywords matter? More specifically, putting your main keywords at the top of the page at least once makes a difference, as Google will put more weight on terms that are higher on a webpage
Meta Tags
Another thing you should keep in mind when optimising your website is to avoid duplicate content. This is paramount as Google themselves state that you should “avoid duplicate or near-duplicate content across your site”.
This applies to all aspects of content; each page should be unique. Unless you’re an ecommerce website, then it can get tricky. If that is the case, try combining pages that contain similar content.
The User Experience
This important and often overlook aspect of website optimisation is crucial as it tries to fulfil the user’s needs. Providing a positive user experience for your customer on your website keeps them loyal and will allow you to define a customer’s journey.
Backlinks
Backlinks, also known as ‘inbound links’ is a link created when one website links to another.
They are valuable to a website as they represent a ‘vote of confidence’ from one site to another. It’s a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. If enough sites link to the same webpage or website, Google can work out that the content is worth linking to, and therefore have a positive effect of the site’s visibility and ranking.
Quality Content
Update your website regularly with new content by creating blog posts. This could be about the latest offers, customer case studies, events you’re attending or hosting. Ensure that the content on each page is well written, rich in key phrases and easy to understand.
These are just a few of the common beneficial SEO techniques that you can start implementing. In other words, there are plenty of ways you can optimise your website, but it is important you master the basics first.
If you struggle with optimising your website effectively. Call us today on 01633 449885, or alternatively email us at hello@allianceagency.co.uk.
