There are 7 areas of your website that are particularly important for search engine optimisation that you, the website owner, can influence and you should always bear these in mind when adding new content.
If you have a CMS website remember these tips as you add new content… it might take a bit longer to add the content to the web, but it really will make a difference to your chances of getting your website found!
SEO Tip 1 – Use the heading tags (h1, h2, h3 etc) options in your WYSIWYG editor rather than simply choosing a colour and size for your headings. You should make sure that you have “key phrases” in your headings whenever possible.
Search engine robots crawling your site will understand that the words in the heading tags have more importance than the paragraph text. If you just change size and colour these robots do not have the coding clues which tell them that they are reading a heading.
Only use the H1 tag once on each page. You may use the other heading tags as many times as you wish, but don’t overdo it!
SEO Tip 2 – The navigation links on your website tell the search engines where they are going when they move from one page to the next and so the link names should be a snapshot of what is to be found on the page. Getting “keywords” into the page urls can provide a great SEO boost. For example, instead of making a page url “bookings.html” choosing “book-holiday-cottage.html” would be far more effective.
SEO Tip 3 – Content is King! The single most important thing you can do on your website to improve your search engine ranking is to add new content regularly. When the search engine robots crawl your site they love finding new information. The more often they find it, the more frequently they will return to index your content.
Make sure that your new content is optimised for keywords and phrases. Choose one or two keywords or phrases to emphasise on each page. If you try to optimise for lots of different keywords, you will water down the effect.
SEO Tip 4 – Creating text links between pages within your site can give your ranking a boost. Never create a link on phrases such as “Click here”. Always make the link on a key phrase that gives clues to where the link will take you. This is good for accessibility and also for the search engine robots. Linking between pages helps to guide the search engines deep into your website. For example: “More tips on SEO”
SEO Tip 5 – Use bold to emphasise keywords within the text of your web page. This once again helps the search engines to understand which keywords are important to your content. However as with all SEO tips, overuse will have a negative effect!
SEO Tip 6 – Use keywords in the page title. This is the title which goes into the blue title bar across the top of your computer screen. This is what Google uses to create a link to your web page when it brings up a search result. If visitors see the keyword they have been searching for in that link, then they are more likely to click on it. The title tag should be no more than 70 characters or it will be curtailed in the search results.
SEO Tip 7 – Make sure you complete the meta description for every page and make this unique to each page. This is the description that is brought up under the link in the search results so you should make it read like a mini advert to encourage visitors to click through. Writing a carefully crafted meta description can make a huge difference to your click-through rate.
The meta description should be no more than 160 characters.
