When creating a new website, most of us want to entice as many new visitors as possible. There are various ways of building a following, such as social media and email campaigns, but something that shouldn’t be ignored is making sure your site is SEO friendly.
To start with, in case you have no coding experience, you may want to consider using an online website building platform to optimize your website. Whether if it’s a blog, small business or e-commerce site, you can create a website from start to finish in no time with a solid online presence to get your site rolling. If you’re using website building tools, better choose a platform that also provides SEO services such as GoDaddy.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Whenever you use a search engine such as Google or Bing, you are presented with a list of sites and pages that are relevant to the word or sentence you have requested. The better the SEO, the higher up the list that site is presented. This is done using various methods and techniques that allow Google (and other search engines) to ‘crawl’ your site and pick out the relevant information residing within.
Having a stunning looking website bristling with interesting content is only great if people can find it. Here we outline some tips that will help improve your SEO, and hopefully boost you further up those Google rankings.
Your Url Should Be Expressive but Simple
Yes, that’s right, even your URL affects your SEO. When naming your pages, make sure they are simple and expressive. An example of a good web page URL would be (www.amazingdogleads.com/metal-leads). A bad example would be (www.amazingdogleads.com/leadpage12red). The first example is easy for a search engine to categorize, where as the second is much more difficult. A google rule of thumb when naming your pages is to ask yourself whether someone who has never seen that particular web page could guess what is on it. If they can, Google probably can too.
Keywords Shouldn’t Only Be Present in Your Copy
Many people believe throwing keywords within the copy is enough to increase your SEO. While it may increase, adding keywords to other area’s of your site can increase it even further. Your keywords can be added to metadata fields, H1 tags, image titles, folder names, and bullet points. Adding your keywords to any of these fields can aid search engines in finding data that might otherwise have not been noticed. Images are particularly easy to optimise, so no more 12.jpg file names. Instead, chocolate-teapot.jpg will enable Google to list that web page as somewhere chocolate teapot enthusiasts might want to check out, and in turn list your page when ‘chocolate teapot’ is requested in a search.
Good Hosting Enables Good SEO
Having a site that runs slowly is not just annoying for your visitors, it can also limit the viewability for search engine crawlers that scour the web, indexing the sites it finds. If you have a site that loads slowly, these crawlers can ignore the content within. Make sure your site is fast to load, and response times are ‘snappy’. This is good practice all around, as a slow website simply doesn’t work in today’s world. If your site is loading slowly, and you have done everything you can to improve speeds, you may want to host your site elsewhere. Something else to bear in mind is that there are companies that provide hosting and web building tools in one package such as hostinger, sitebuilder, bluehost that would help you in keeping things as simple as possible and having all your needs met under one roof.
Make Sure You Keep Refreshing Content
Search engines like to know that the website they are promoting is still relevant. A website that hasn’t been updated for over a year is likely to slip down rankings quicker than one that is constantly being edited and added to. Keeping things fresh is good practice two-fold, as it entices new viewers as well as search engine crawlers. Both of which, should be highly welcomed on a site that wishes to stay ahead of the game.
Get Social
Another thing search engines love, is social media. Get your social media links added to your website immediately, with icons and buttons that allow your viewers to flow seamlessly between your website and Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and alike. The more links to your website the busier it becomes, and the busier it becomes, the higher it climbs in rankings.
Be Original, Don’t Duplicate
As tempting as it might be, try not to duplicate content from other sources. Keep your content original, and avoid ‘copy and pasting’ large volumes of text from elsewhere. You may be able to fool the average user, but you can’t fool the search engine bots. While you might need to quote text from time to time, just be aware that quoting is OK, copying is not. If you find some copy elsewhere on the web that is ‘just perfect for your site’, change the wording up a bit. Re-write it in your own voice. Not only is it better for SEO, it is also more interesting for your visitors.
Size, to a Degree, Matters
While you don’t have to write an entire book on your site, make sure you have enough copy to look and feel worthwhile. Anything above 300 words is fine, but having only two sentence paragraphs on a page can cause issues when it comes to SEO. Flesh out your writing a bit, and you should reap the rewards.
Links, Links and More Links
Do you have a sister site to the one you are building? Do you have compatriots that aren’t rivals, but your visitors may be interested in? Or perhaps a website that you feel might be of interest to your viewers? Link to them. These links build a web within themselves that shows your website has a web presence. Link to other sites, and get them to link to you. Linking is good for everyone involved. Taking advice from the experts is also something you should be doing. There are plenty of websites discussing SEO-friendly website builders, that give you an easy to determine score in regards to how good they are at boosting your search engine optimization.
Building a great website can be tricky, but sticking to these sorts of simple rules will help make your website flourish. Over time you should start to see the rewards, but it is always worth remembering, optimising your site for search engines is an ongoing battle. Build these techniques into your workflow, and it should start to feel like second nature. You will find that the gains far outweigh the initial effort. Get optimising!