It is becoming more and more difficult to gain that top spot within Google. Business ideas are becoming less niche and there are more websites competing against one another. This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) comes into place, and utilising it will help your website gain the spot it deserves in the search results.
Many businesses are thinking how do I get my website to rank higher in Google? Google uses complex algorithms to rank each page on the internet, which basically means it evaluates hundreds of aspects to determine how relevant your website is to the phrase that was typed in by the searcher. Search engine optimisation and the quality of your content are massive factors to help you gain the first-page spot in the search engine results. Statistics tell us that 75% of people won’t click past the first page. So this is where this blog post will help you create the best results for your website. Keep reading to find out our top SEO tips.
Essential Tools To Help You
There are a few essential tools that you can use to help you start your SEO journey. If you use WordPress for your website then you can download a free plugin called Yoast SEO, which gives you a traffic light rating on how your content is optimised and also how well it is written. It will also give you pointers on what you can work on and what you have done well.
Another tool that will help you out is Google Analytics. It can be quite difficult to get used to due to the amount of data that is in one place, but once you get your head around it, this tool can be very useful. Google Analytics can give you insightful information such as your bounce rate (amount of visitors that land on a page then clicks straight off the website) and the most popular pages on your website.
Analytics will help you to gain the data from your websites, which can then be put forward to improve parts of both your business and website.
Google has also created Google Search Console, which specialises with the SEO part rather than Google Analytics which specialises with the data. Search Console is a service where you can check your website to check indexing status and how good your optimisation is.
Google has created basic qualifications where you can learn and implement Google services. You will learn then gain a qualification after. This is a good place to start if you want to learn more about Analytics or their other services.
The fundamentals to help you rank higher in Google
When it comes to content writing and setting your web page up for SEO, there are a few factors that you can complete, which Google will show your page as more relevant. This will push you higher to the top spot in the search results.
Page Titles – H1’s
Possibly one of the most important factors to help your keywords rank higher would be to include your businesses chosen keywords within the H1 title on each page. H1 is the code we use to mark a title on a website page as the most important. For example, if your keyword was “Web design company Staffordshire” then within your title you could say “take a look at our web design services within Staffordshire.” Here, you would be utilising your keywords, making it easier for Google to rank your page.
However, with keywords, it is only recommended to incorporate that keyword between 2-3 times within your text. If you include more, Google will consider you “stuffing” the page to include keywords.
H1’s (titles) will play a vital part for your website, as this piece of information will tell Google what your page is all about. However, it is important to only include one H1 on each page. If you were to include more, then Google might get confused about what your page was actually about.
Alt Tags
Another tip is to include alt (alternative text) tags onto any images used on your website. An alt tag is a word or maybe a phrase that will tell web users the meaning of that particular image. It’s good in terms of SEO, as this can include your keywords. Which helps Google to rank you higher. You also will get people reverting back to your website if they were to find the image you have used from Google Images.
Focus Keyphrase when using Yoast
This is a tip for if you are using Yoast through WordPress – within this plugin you can set a “focus keyphrase” for each page. This will be a short title or sentence explaining what that current page is about. Here is a great opportunity to include your keywords or even include your area within. Like “web design in Staffordshire.” This will tell Google straight away what that present page is about. If you aren’t using Yoast then you will just need to do the same within the meta title section.
Meta Description
We would always include a meta description for every page that your website has. A meta description is the small part of the text that you see under your title when you do a Google search. It is important that the first paragraph on that page utilises your chosen keywords for that page as when you add a meta description, you usually use the first part of the text on the page. Getting those keywords in will help Google see the relevance in your text, boosting you higher on the search pages.
Inbound and outbound links
Inbound and outbound links are a crucial part when it comes to SEO. Inbound links are where you are creating a link back to your website from another site and an outbound link is including links on your website pointing to another site. Links are great for showing Google that your content is relevant. But don’t get links from anywhere – make sure that they are high-quality links back to yourself, else if not this will make your business lower in the result pages.
Page Speed
Google says that if your website doesn’t load within 2.5 seconds that you are considered a slow loading website. A lot of people will move to the next website if your pages take forever to load. In most cases, what is slowing peoples websites is the image sizes used. This is why using small sizes images or compressing them will make a massive change in making your web page quicker.
Mobile Friendly
Our last tip for today would be to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. At the moment, Google are concentrating on websites that are well optimised for mobile. This means that when your website moves to smaller screens the content compresses and shows in a similar style to what it does on bigger screens. If your website doesn’t do this then Google won’t rank your website very well.
There are so many more tips to help with SEO, but these are our most recommended tips that will give you great results. If you need any more information or maybe you would like us to help you with utilising these tips then feel free to contact us.