5 Expert Tips to Improve Your Website SEO

Your website's search engine optimization (SEO) directly impacts how users discover and interact with your site. Your website is one of the first things users see when searching for your business. In fact, Google often displays website links as a result rather than websites themselves in their search results. 

This means you can’t rely on being listed at the top of Google to drive traffic to your site. You need a well-optimised website to ensure your audience can easily find you online. This blog post will give you 5 tips on optimising your website for search engines.

Website SEO is the driving force behind the most successful online businesses. With internet usage peaking in 2022, never before has clinical SEO been needed so prominently to gain visibility in this crowded online community.

Here are 5 Expert Tips to Improve your Website SEO

Keywords

Although SEO has evolved whereby keywords are not the only protagonist in online marketing, they still form the backbone of all SEO campaigns. Firstly you identify your keywords, then you optimise them by creating content written around them and including them. To ensure you get your keyword research right, if you are new to digital marketing, it would be wise to enlist the service of an SEO agency.

With many businesses seeing a gap in the market due to the pandemic, they have increased their marketing spending. This has resulted in many popular keywords targeted by companies with a bigger marketing budget than you. Therefore new tactics for start-ups and small businesses have been to target LSI  keywords and phrases. These have less competition but are easier to rank to gain convertible traffic and start to grow your marketing budget to compete on the more competitive keywords.

Content

Developing a content strategy has never been more critical for SEO and ranking results than it is post-pandemic. Content marketing assists businesses in planning and preparing to gain a higher amount of inbound leads and overall traffic. Google and the other search engines are hungry for accurate, up-to-date, engaging and informative content.

Over the last two years, behaviour patterns have favoured businesses that kept their information up-to-date and accurate. During that difficult period, companies who were not afraid to explain delays and distribution issues found new followers that have continued to follow. Content curation is included in packages offered by an SEO agency. If you are already working with one, ensure a good relationship and provide them with as much new information about your services, products and changes within your industry.  

If you are creating content yourself, remember a couple of tips:

• Who is creating what content?
• What platform is it being published on?
• What date and time is it going live?

Try not always to be selling your business. Always write to your visitors, put yourselves in their shoes, curious about what you offer but know little about how the product or service works. And just as important, remember to add value to your content. Millennials have an acute awareness of when they are being sold to, so try to add valuable information that isn't selling you all the time. 

Adding value means the visitors feel like they have learned something when visiting your website, blog or social media platform.

Also, write in as many keywords that you are targeting as possible, so your content is keyword rich. However,  ensure you don't use a keyword more than three to five times on any web page or blog submission. Google now looks for keyword stuffing in content and will penalise websites that infringe.

Metadata

Metadata now plays a significant role in SERPs ranking. Get it right, and Google will see precisely what your web page represents and what you are offering and can rank you accordingly, get it wrong, and you'll be wondering for months why all the other SEO work doesn't have the desired effect! 

Title Metadata

It is the most important for each of your web pages. Your title should be descriptive and match the purpose of the page. Then your content with well-placed keywords will clarify to Google that you provide what the user is searching for. 

Description Metadata

This is the text description to show what is contained within your webpage. Search engines don't always use them, but it is necessary to optimise them just in case. The standard for a good meta description is around two complete sentences.

Links Create Links

A website that has authoritative, unbiased content and is a resource of helpful information is the first step, and including valuable links throughout is the next step.

Once you have achieved this, your site is more likely to attract links from others looking for guest posts and link building; this will increase rankings. 

By adding relevant links throughout your site, you are adding to your online authority and credibility. To take advantage of this content, curators no longer use 'click here' because that contains zero search engine value, only the URL you have attached. 

If you use descriptive wording, for example, 'precision welding tools'  with the relevant URL, you also include a keyword that enhances your ranking. 

Adding descriptive links improves user experience (UX) as the user knows what they are clicking and adds value and clarity.

Use Alt Tags

When you post up video or image content, you now need to ensure you describe them correctly to the search engine crawlers. 

In doing so, you are directing the crawlers to locate your page. Here are descriptive examples:

search.google.com/search-console—an excellent reference for understanding your Google site stats

www.moz.com—professional blog and SEO tools

For example, "MOZ" are well-known within the digital marketing industry for providing cutting-edge analytical tools, but what would MOZ mean to someone new to SEO? 

Here you can see clearly how the descriptive element makes it easy for both the crawlers and users to identify what the link contains. 

SUMMARY

With SEO now a vital requirement for a website owner, you must manage your workload. If you are new to SEO and trying to grow a business, it is wise to consider an SEO agency to carry the load while you focus on new leads that the SEO campaign generates. With more ranking factors than ever, it is wise to seek professional help. Good luck.