How to improve your website SEO

“How to improve your website SEO” is the golden question all business owners with a website ask. Along with “why am I not on Google’s first page?”.
 
As a company that develops websites for businesses from design, copy and coding up, we always make sure we integrate the following SEO principals into our web designs.
 

Principals to improve your website SEO:

Choose a focus keyword: Choose one keyword/keyword phrase you would like to define the content of your page. You can do this one of two ways. Firstly, if your keyword is part of any overall strategy to drive traffic to your website based on the services your business provides, then use Google’s Keyword Planner and see what keywords are most searched on Google about your services offerings (therefore what keyword phrases have the ability to attract the most traffic). Pinpoint the keywords with the highest search rates and use them across your website. Otherwise, if you want to be more specific about the keyword, choose a keyword phrase written exactly as someone would type it into Google (asking friends and family what they would type is great for this!).
 
Use the keyword/keyword phrase in your page titles: Search engines and bots read websites from the top down, so it’s always important that your keyword/keyword phrase is a prominent feature at the top of your webpage. Using the keyword/keyword phrase in your SEO Title, Page Header, and a Subheader will help Google/the bot recognise quickly that your page legitimately answers the needs of the search enquiry.
 
Use the keyword/keyword phrase in your URL: In keeping with the top-to-bottom principals of SEO, having the keyword in your URL is an extremely important part of SEO. For example, notice the URL of the blog? Our keyword phrase for this blog post is “improve your website seo” – you can see this keyword phrase also features in our URL.
 
Use the keyword/keyword phrase in your meta description: A meta description is the description you give to search engines about your web page (like below). It is vital that your keyword/keyword phrase appears in the meta description. You have 156 characters to work with for a meta description, make sure you use as many of them as you can.
 

Use the keyword/keyword phrase in your content: It’s pretty self explanatory that you should use your keyword/keyword phrase in your content – the key is to position it well. If you can start the page content off with your keyword than that’s great! The earlier the keyword appears the better because, remember, search engines and bots read from top-bottom. If your keyword doesn’t feature in the first line then they will assume it’s not that important. Also remember that a minimum of 300 words is usually required to practise good SEO and you should mention your key word/keyword phrase more than once in your content.
 
Use the keyword/keyword phrase in your alt image tags: When you insert an image into your web page there is something called an “alt tag” which allows you to add a description of the image for search engines/bots to read in your code, but it won’t actually appear on your web page like say, a caption. Inserting images in general are a good SEO practise, so be sure to add your keyword/keyword phrase to the alt tags of all the images you use.
 
Don’t use the same keyword/keyword phrase more than once: This is why Google’s Keyword Planner is helpful as you can find different search variations about the same topic. It’s important that you don’t have more than one web page using the exact same keyword/keyword phrase as search engines won’t know which page to prioritise, so it brings down your overall SEO.
 
Include external links: Link to high ranking external websites I your content, this legitimises your content in the eyes on bots and search engines. You only have to include one external link (see what we did there?) per page to help improve your website SEO.
 
I hope we’ve answered “”How to improve your website SEO.” If you can tick off most of these principals on every web page with an identifying focus keyword, then you can be assured your website will rank well. Getting to Google’s first page after the SEO is done is another topic for another day…
 
If you would like to talk to us about developing or redesigning a website for you, contact us today or read more about our web development services here.