It is very common for website design agencies to charge huge price tag strategies when you want to improve your SEO. Search Engine Optimisation is a black art to the unwise, and website design strategists are trying their best to sell you something that you can do mostly yourself, if of course you have the time.
Please have a read of our SEO page for further information.
We have some top tips to get you most of the way there yourself, all it will cost you is time.
What is SEO?
Firstly SEO stands for search engine optimisation. What SEO is, is a way of Google or other search engines to diagnose your website’s value. Search engines crawl the internet looking for what ever a ‘browser’ has entered into the search criteria, the search engine gives priority to websites that are considered trustworthy, producing relevant content and have a visibility across the internet.
Optimising your website so that search engines can find you is what a website developer or social media manager does. Optimising websites is not difficult, it just takes time.
Improving Your SEO
Hosting Provider
The first thing about SEO is that Google likes SPEED. In fact it loves it. Your hosting provider has a ‘server’ that links you to the internet. The more expensive (just to make this simple to understand) your hosting provider the more likelihood of your website having a FAST SPEED access to the internet. For websites that load up in over 5 seconds Google will add you lower in pecking order to a website that loads up in 2 seconds for example.
Of course, this isn’t the only thing that dictates your position on Google.
Onsite SEO Tips
Your onsite SEO is vital to google crawling your website. This includes what content and images you have used, what links you have to other pages on your site, and of other sites relevant to your site.
Use quality titles that refer to your keywords. And use the ‘H’ tags appropriately.
Ensure your content directly relates to any specified keywords you want to rank for.
Include ‘Alt text’ for images, essentially telling google what the image is and how it relates to your company. Simply write in a description of your product, done. This will improve your SEO health considerably.
Add to your website any reviews, posts, blogs and link your website to relevant websites that work within the same industry, but do not compete.
Off-site SEO Tips
Let’s say your website has no links anywhere on the internet except for your own website. How does google find you then? Well, simply, it will, but you will most likely be on page 299 where no one will find you.
Therefore it is important that you begin to build back links to your website.
Back Links
Backlinks are simply links from other websites that lead back to your website, and are easy to gain, but high quality backlinks are quite hard to gain. The higher quality backlinks are deemed ‘higher quality’ because of the website they come from. If you have a dog grooming website, and you have a backlink to your website from ‘Crufts’, of course this is better than having a back link from your friend on face book. Google recognises that Crufts are a more reliable service than your friend. Understanding this will already help you improve your SEO.
So now imagine you have 1,000 high quality back links, and 100,000 low quality back links, Google has a bigger chance of knowing who you are, and what you are.
The best tips I have are to create your blog, posts regularly on all social media platforms, and comment on any post that you feel is relevant to your business on other blogs (such as reddit).
If you are posting on other websites or blogs, try to get a mixture of those that allow ‘dofollow’ links, and ‘nofollow’ links. Click here to read more about ‘dofollow’ and ‘nofollow’ links.
Having a mixture of high quality do and no follow links will look authentic to Google. Google will penalise you if it feels you are buying your way to the top, so be mindful of companies that offer you 1000 do follow links that have no relevancy to your business.
You can also add your business to local listings, such as Google My Business which will add you to Google Maps, Bing Places for Business, Yell.com etc…
Paid Marketing
Paid marketing is always an option through website based newspapers or media channels. This can get pricey though.
Reviews
The best form of advertising is word of mouth. If you have already had customers who enjoy your product, reach out to them and ask that they write a review of your business, and then put that onto Google My Business Profile, or better yet, get the customer to leave the review on Google Maps for you. This will increase your Google rating adn of course improve your SEO too.
Keep this up, do things organically and make the content relevant to your company, and slowly, over time you will see the great SEO results. Of course, depending on the industry you work in will determine how competitive your industry is for Ranking #1 on Google.
You might also like to take a look at Common Web Design Mistakes.
How to Improve Your ON-SITE SEO
For any other information please contact us.
