As you probably know, SEO techniques are changing all the time, with Google and other search engines constantly updating the way they rank the most valuable websites. Here are a few of my latest hints and tips to keep your website SEO friendly throughout 2015
Table of Contents
Keywords
- One of the important aspect is making sure you are targeting keywords with every post/page.
- Don’t use too many keywords (max of 3 keywords per page/post) and don’t use each keyword more than once in each location.
- Keywords used in the same page/post need to be relevant to each other e.g. plumbing and heating could be two keywords used on the same page, whereas plumbing and gardening don’t tie in together and will only confuse the search engines as to what you really do.
- Keywords need to be different on each page.
- Your homepage is an exception, and will likely contain keywords that give an overview of your whole website. E.g. Heating Engineers, Plumbing and Property Services could be your 3 homepage keywords, then you can have 3 additional pages, one for each area of work, each with their own keywords: 3x Plumbing related keywords, 3x Heating related keywords and 3x Property Services related keywords.
- Keywords should be present in your:
- Title Tag
- URL
- Descriptions
- Content Headers
But each one of the areas should be unique in its content.
Link Building
- Internal links including your navigation links are crucial to mapping out your content and allowing search engines to understand exactly what you are offering.
- Backlinks into your website from reputable, well ranked websites will positively impact your website, especially from other websites in your industry. The number of links is not as important as the quality of their source. An increase in good links will increase your reputation, but many bad links will be less useful that one good one.
- Outgoing links to reputable, well ranked websites demonstrate that you’re showing your visitors other useful resources, and this will reflect well on your website
Content
- Duplicate content will penalize your rankings heavily. Ensure that all of your content is unique, and nothing is copy/pasted from other sources.
- Quality content is key. Google is wanting to present its users with the best possible sources of information, and they are getting good at ranking websites based on exactly that. Ensure that your content is useful, has real value for your customers as well as others in your industry.
- Regularly updated content is extremely important. The more quality content you publish and share with the world, the better your reputation will become and more value you add to your industry online – Google will rank you accordingly.
Meta Tags
- Meta Tags are less and less important, with Google assessing your websites content to rank you over the tags. Relevant tags can be included, but I would focus on the pages/posts content, with tags secondary.
- Meta Title/ Descriptions are very important. As mentioned in the keywords section, these have to be unique on every page and contain no more than 3 keywords.
- Your title should be 55 to 65 characters and your description should be 140 to 160 characters long. Anything longer than this wont be read by search engines.
Sitemap
- Permalinks allow you to manage your url structure. This means you can customise the website address for your individual pages, and include your keywords into the urls.
- Google Sitemap is important to allow Google to map out your website, your content and fully understand what you do and rank you accordingly.
- Redirections. Most websites have pages that get added, edited and deleted over time as the website develops, and it’s important to manage these changes using the appropriate redirects. If pages get deleted or changed, you will need to ensure that old urls are forwarded to new ones, so traffic doesn’t get lost and page rank is forwarded on to new pages.
- Ping Services are valuable when publishing new content or editing current content. It encourages online networks and search engines to crawl the website and list your new content. they are mainly info, who is, about us, website statistic, value, business listings and directories with dedicated URLs.
Others
- Image ALT Tags should be added to all imagery. Alt tags should be relevant to the image content itself and the post/page it’s been shown on. Alt tags should vary from image title tags.
- Broken links should be monitored and redirected as necessary. This includes broken links within your website and to external websites.
Accessibility
- Your pages loading time is becoming increasingly important, especially with the huge audience now browsing the web across mobile phone networks, which are typically much slower than home/office internet connections. Google and other search engines will rank your website higher, if it’s faster loading, offering a better experience for the viewer
- Responsive design (Making your website optimised for desktop, tablets and mobile) is another reasonably new factor that’s affecting your website rankings. Responsive and mobile compatible websites aren’t new, but their necessity for good rankings is increasing all the time. A non responsive website offers a bad experience to people using mobile phones, tablets and other devices with small screens (as well as large HD screens), and is considered less valuable than responsive websites.