Top 5 SEO Tips for smashing your SEO
Posted on 28th March 2018
SEO is all about getting virtual ‘bums on seats’ or, in politer language, visits to your website. But did you know that good SEO – SEO that really works – is actually a side-effect of good engagement? That might sound a bit cryptic but it’s really quite simple.
Your goal as a business owner isn’t to get every Tom, Dick and Harry to visit your website. An aggressive approach to SEO might make it happen. But this kind of approach invariably results in a sky-high bounce rate and minuscule dwell time – followed by a nose-dive down the Google rankings.
Instead, your goal is to get people who are genuinely interested in your product or service to visit your site, spend some time there and do what you want them to do. Which might be to call you up for an appointment, make a purchase or simply find out more about your brand. In short: engage with your business. If you get this right, your SEO rankings will soar, along with your profits.
So, how can you use SEO to drive engagement? In this article, we give you our top 5 tips for getting the most from your SEO activities, so you attract the right people to your site as well as fly up the Google rankings for your product or service.
1. Use Google and other tools for keyword research
The starting point of good engagement is to find words and phrases which resonate with your target audience. Read our article on effective keyword research to find out how you can use free online tools to identify the best search terms for your product or service.
2. Use your main keyword at the start of page titles
A page title is arguably the most important factor used in search engine rankings. It’s part of the metadata in the back end of your website and is used to describe each page of your site. When a result for that page is displayed on a search engine, this is the information that people will see.
For example, the page title for our Home page reads: ‘Web design Nottingham | Online marketing Nottingham |it’seeze Nottingham’. ‘Web design Nottingham’ is the most important search term for our business, so it comes at the front of the page title. Along with ‘Online marketing Nottingham’, it also describes what we do. And including our company name makes it easier for people to find us if they’re searching for us by name.
Here are some more tips from Google to help you create amazing page titles:
Choose a title that reads naturally and effectively communicates the page’s content
Avoid titles that use default or vague wording like ‘Page 1’ or ‘New page’
Don’t keep using the same title across lots of pages and avoid long titles stuffed with keywords
Instead, create unique titles for each page that are concise and descriptive.
3. Remove non-content pages from SEO searches
By non-content, we mean pages like your website Terms & Conditions, Cookie Policy and so on. There’s an argument that any content that makes your website show up in the rankings serves a purpose. But do you really want a potential customer’s first view of your website to be a boring page packed with legal jargon? No, you don’t.
You can stop search engines listing these pages by taking out the robots.txt file in the back end of the relevant page. This stops it being crawled and indexed by search engine spiders. It’s also a useful tool for sites that are under development, or pages you’re not yet ready to publish. For live sites, it increases keyword density by excluding content that’s not directly relevant to your business – making it easier for people to find you.
4. Update your site regularly
This is a no-brainer, but also the SEO ‘must do’ that tends to be ignored. Unfortunately, if you don’t get down to it, you could find that all the legwork you put in to optimise your site becomes redundant. And it’s not just about blogging, although this is important. You need to revisit your main site regularly, updating and adding to the content to keep it current, relevant and interesting.
To get the best possible results, add in interactive content whenever you can – the search engines love it. That means online videos, audio podcasts, discussion forums and anything else that encourages people to engage with your site. Written content is still crucial, however, so if you don’t have time to update your web pages and blog, ask about our copywriting service.
5. Carry out link-building activities
It stands to reason that the more places link to your website, the more visits you’ll get. This means regular links to your site from your social media accounts and encouraging followers to share your post and blog content. It’s also a good idea to register your business with as many online directories as you can find – most of them are free and they often rank highly on listings for geographical searches.
As with all SEO activities, link-building can backfire so tread carefully if you’re new to it. There’s lots of useful information online that will help you create a search engine-friendly strategy that will help, not harm, your rankings.
Need a little help? Just ask it’seeze!
Our expert website support team are here to help with your SEO if you lack the time, aren’t sure where to start or just want someone else to do it! Visit our website to find out how we can help or give us a call on 0115 777 3001 to discuss your requirements.
Tagged as: SEO
Share this post: