So, where do you start with SEO?
Well, you’ve found yourself spending a lot of effort on building and designing your website, and you’ve read everything online on how to make it as eye-catching as possible. You then find terms like heatmaps and user experience creeping into your vocabulary. Yet, after all, is said and done, your beautiful website is still not getting the visitors you need.
That means it’s ‘time to dive into SEO.’ SEO means search engine optimisation and is your way to build out the right digital online presence. That means people will find your site when they look, primarily on Google Search and Microsoft’s Bing search tool.
Tip 1. Commitment with the right keywords
It’s commitment time. The keywords you select need to appear in nearly every piece of content that you produce. Since you’re going to produce a lot of content, you’re going to see these keywords coming up. Google gets lazy and often looks at the top part of your site, so make sure you’re using those words in the beginning.
You want a set of keywords to work with continuously, from individual words such as “waffle” to longtail words such as “where to eat waffles in Bradford”. Make sure you’re happy with them, as they’ll be with you for the long run.
Tip 2. Research your keywords for optimum SEO
Sadly you’re not done when you’ve picked the word waffle and everything related to it. People’s tastes change, and so must yours. Nevertheless, the trend is your friend so embrace it deeply.
For example, maybe there’s an existing trend to make waffles from home, and maybe the trend shifts from homemade croffles (a hybrid of a croissant and waffle). You can give yourself an advantage by heading to sites such as Answerthepublic and seeing the trends as they happen. However, keep in mind that so can everyone else, and you’ll also be competing with them.
Tip 3. Images and videos can only be seen with text
Thankfully Google isn’t a sentient being. It only understands text at the moment. Sadly. That means they’re blind to your images. So you can take a picture of the best waffles being eaten by dragons, but without any text to attribute to it, may as well be white space on your site.
To get past the philosophy of your image, just do two things. First, give your filenames relevant titles (such as dragons eating waffles). Then you want to give it alt text, which can be a relevant sentence describing your image (think long-tail keywords here: dragons eating waffles in Bradford).
Tip 4. Give the people what they want
Be dominant with your content. That means what you put out there needs to be relevant and fantastic for the machine and people. Once you get that traction, you get a compounding effect like a snowball becoming an avalanche. Your key content pushes you ahead with Google’s checks, and people start coming to your site, forming you into a master of content and building something known as domain authority.
Tip 5. Give a map to search engines with internal linking
Time to be the captain here. Search engine optimisation means design optimisation too. Don’t make it hard to where X marks the spot. Think of yourself as drawing a digital map for a robot. A very… unintelligent robot. That’s what your sitemap helps with.
First, make sure that the anchor text that will redirect the user is rich with the core keywords; think of those as signposts. Then you want to ensure there’s logic to your linking and the path you’ve built. Guess what? This also helps you with your goal of being a master of content and getting your domain authority up.
Tip 6. Be an authority with backlinks is also vital for SEO
Think Wikipedia. You want everyone to take your content and reference it as often as possible. The more you get, the more important Google thinks you are. This is known as backlinking, where people use your content and link back to your site. You become a mini Wikipedia based on your specific subject matter. If you want a fast way of getting people to reuse your content, get infographics and images in your content. People love that type of stuff.
Tip 7. Build a race car website
As the gatekeeper for search engine glory, Google hates when it has to check your website, and it’s slow. It’s like a traffic cop trying to take the time to find your information to give you a ticket. The ticket just gets worse right? Same with Google, which penalises you for slow websites. Those few people visiting your site will also not appreciate your ‘taking-too-long-to-load’ website.
There are lots of plugins out there, or if you’re already using a lot of images or video – use a content delivery network. Get the load off your site and into professionals to distribute it properly.
Tip 8. Use Google Analytics
There’s no way around it. If you want to beat the machine, you must see what it says about you. It’s a great tool in general, besides helping you with your SEO mission. I’ll give you metrics from user count to where they go on your site, where they’re from, and other items. Google Analytics will happily tell you when you’re doing something wrong as well, such as getting too many people coming to your site and bouncing off too soon.
Tip 9. Be Unique for your SEO
With so much content and websites out there, this may seem almost impossible, but it’s not! Either way, you can do it, and you need to. In the ongoing theme of the Google Punishment model, they will severely punish your site and SEO ranking if they find duplicated content. That means goodbye to any of those AI tools that seem to write the same things repeatedly. So it’s not just the article on chilli waffles you wrote but everything on the site itself.
Tip 10. Keep your content fresh
Imagine a laundry reference here. Only you’re talking about digital content instead of socks. Content can get old and stale too, so you either replace it with new content or refresh old content. If you don’t clean your digital laundry, your site gets harmed, and your SEO is weaker. You also lose the authority to other, newer sites.
Extra Tip. Our SEO Services can give you the leg up you need
Here are some final tips to help get you moving. First, remember to submit your website to Google Search Console, which will start the web crawling process. Then you’ll create a sitemap, which essentially guides the web crawler while also letting it know how often the site is updated.
Finally, if you have a location you want to share, make sure to have a Google My Business page as well. Oh, and always consider working with local experts, especially with us, who is your local SEO company in Bradford. Get in touch today to see what we can do to help you.