Top 5 simple SEO tips

Search engine optmisation, SEO, is seen as a bit of a mystery by most people who want to improve the visibility of their website and attract more organic traffic. If you want you can have professionals, like TekFirst based in Harrogate, have a look at your website but having worked in the field for eight years I wanted to share some simple steps you can do yourself to help boost your website or blog. Follow these five top tips –

Make sure your site is accessible

A few months ago I was hired to do an audit on a lovely website for a graphic designer who wanted to attract more traffic, in turn attracting more customers. Despite being a beautifully designed site it had been built on a platform which search engines, like Google, are unable to read and therefore had little to no chance of attaining good rankings.

In order to understand what your website is about it needs to be accessible or readable by search engines which prefer simple HTML over other programming languages which can offer more jazzy interactions. The easiest way to check if Google can read your website is to check the cached version of your site (Google stores snapshots of websites so it can find results faster).

To do this add ‘cache:’ in front of your website’s URL, this should bring up the cached version and you can see what Google ‘sees’. For an even more realistic view choose the ‘text only’ version (Google can’t read images). If the cached version is blank or has very little text appearing you should consider changing the platform your site uses or add more text to your pages.

Optimise your page titles

Search engines need to understand what your website is about in order to show it in search results. The way they understand the topic of your site is to read the text on the page, with some elements of the page being more significant than others such as page titles.

It is important that your website page titles include relevant keywords and phrases to make sure that search engines know what the topic of your page is and therefore what to rank your page for in search engine results.

Note that most search engines use a maximum of 60 chars for the title, so try and keep your titles short and sweet whilst keeping keywords present.

Optimise your images

I mentioned earlier that search engines can not read images which makes them all but useless when it comes to informing search engines about the topic of the page. However, you can get around this problem by using some simple HTML elements to help search engines understand what an image shows.

When uploading an image to your blog you will often see fields marked Alt text, title and description, all of which attach information to an image file which search engines can read and understand. Make sure that all your images include this information by adding informative titles, descriptions and alt text.

The best way to do this is to image you are describing the image to a person who can not see it and use this as your alt text as this is routinely used by screen reading programs which help partially sighted and blind people understand what is displayed on a web page. It helps to include keywords in these elements, but make sure they appear naturally as too much can appear manipulative to search engines.

Use HTML correctly

HTML can help search engines understand the landscape of a web page including what information is more important than others. I have already mentioned page titles but here are more elements which can help.

Headings are very important to signify importance on a page so using the correct mark up is essential. Use the H1 tag to flag your main heading on a page, this is usually the same as the page title on a blog, and use H2 and H3 tags to highlight other headings in the hierarchy of importance. I tend to use H2 for subheadings like I have done in this post.

For more information on using HTML correctly take a look at this guide.

Build links

Search engines not only look at your website or blog when deciding on where to rank you in search engine results but they also look at how authoritative your site is, determined by the links pointing to your site. The more quality links pointing to your site the better as this makes you look like an expert in your field which other people choose to cite based on your expertise.

Building links can be hard but there are a few simple ways to do this: contribute to other websites/ blogs and include a link to your site in your bio, produce a really interesting/exciting/ provocative blog post or document (Ebook, Infographic etc) which attracts links naturally or organise an event for fellow bloggers where you may gain natural links and mentions in post-event coverage.