In our previous post we introduced you to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and why it is important to your website and business. To recap; by making small changes to your website, you can improve your search engine ranking, increase your website traffic, and ultimately bring in more business!
So now that you know you want to use it, we're going to show you how! Let's take a look at a few easy things you can do.
Start out by using your URLs correctly; make sure you use URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure. This will provide web users and search engines with accurate information about the web page, helping them to find it.
Also, make sure that you use hyphens, not underscores, in your URLs. Search engines see words separated by underscores as one big word, making it harder for them to find your keywords. Also avoid using long, complex URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs. Just remember: Keep it simple and keep it short!
One important thing that is often overlooked is your website navigation. It's important that your website it user-friendly and intuitive, because believe it or not, website navigation affects your search engine ranking as well. And most importantly, your potential customers aren't going to waste their time trying to figure out a poorly structured website.
Your website should follow a logical hierarchy by letting each page link easily to every other page, making it simple for people to find the information they need. Even better is if you include a breadcrumb list, which is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to navigate back through previous pages.
Other small, but important details of your website are your meta descriptions and meta keywords. The meta description is a tag that goes in the head section of your webpage, to describe the content of your page when it appears in search results. Keeping these descriptions accurate and simple will increase your website ranking. Also make sure you've got the right words in your meta keywords to help the search engine find your website - they should be relevant to your website content, and high ranking. You can check this on Google Keyword Search.
Also important are your title tags, which tell both users and search engines what your page is about. You may have seen these on search results pages. Make sure relevant keywords occur in your page title to increase your SEO, and make it eye-catching so people will want to click through to read more.
Well, that covers the basics. There are two other things you can do to increase our SEO: Link building and website content, but these are a little more in-depth, so we will touch on those in the next blog posts.