Where To Start With SEO?

So, you have just made your website live, it looks great, all the animations are working and all the links connect, but you are not getting the high amount of traffic you thought a new site would deliver – the culprit behind this, your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) value!

Many companies forget the importance of SEO when it comes to building a brand-new website. However, it is easily rectified with a few changes. In this post we will teach you the 3 values of SEO and how they affect the presence of your website on the Google search results page.

On-page SEO

This SEO value looks at how your pages are optimised. For example, content, tags and URLS. To begin with on-page SEO you need to look at your websites content, does it include your keywords and provide potential customers with as much detail as possible?

If it doesn’t then you will need to have a re-think of the content and potentially introduce appropriate keywords into the content naturally. Another item to investigate is the title tag, this is the section displayed to users in the search results page and also at the top of your browser.

It is vital this contains a couple of your main keywords, as this will grant search engines an understanding of what your page offers and if it suits a user’s search – if it does your site should appear.

Optimal Title Tag format:

Primary keyword – Secondary keyword | Brand Name

 

Off-Page SEO

This SEO value is regarding actions that are taken outside your website can have an impact on your rank on search engine result pages.

For example, a site may link back to a blog post your have posted previously as they enjoyed the content and want their viewers/customers to read – these are called backlinks. A good way to receive a higher number of backlinks is to make sure your content is of a higher quality and is better than your competitors.

The more backlinks you receive the more search engines see your content as a higher quality and reward you for this. There are three main types of backlinks your site can receive, these are:

 

• Natural links – these links are granted without any action from the site owner. For example, someone who wants to share your article about a specific product.
• Manually built links – These links are requested by the site owner, they can include getting customers to link to your site, or influencers sharing your content
• Self-created links – these are links that the site owner has created themselves. For example, online directory, press releases etc…

Technical SEO

This SEO value looks at details ‘behind’ your website like the code and how quick your website loads. This is where you will need to look at your page source, one of the vital parts you will need to look out for is if your site is mobile friendly.

Google first look at how friendly your website is towards mobiles before deciding on where to rank your site. There are certain parts of the code which make your site mobile friendly, your web developer should be aware of what these are, but it is just part of the code where developers can alter a page’s content depending on a certain sized browser.

Another section of the technical SEO is how quick your website loads, Google’s ideal load time of a page is 1 second, this may seem very short, but if your page is optimised properly this shouldn’t be hard to achieve.

A way to make sure your sites code is optimised is by making sure tags are optimised. For example, if multiple tags are required to be a certain colour, it is best practice to make sure all the tags are put into the same CSS Tag, again your web developer should be aware of this:

 

Poorly optimised:

H1 {

color:black}

P {

color:black}

Optimised:

H1, P {

color:black}

Now, with these added tools you should now be able to optimise your website and reach more potential customers through search engines, but as with anything it is all trial and error.

So, make sure you note what changes you have made and what impact it has on the website stats.

Speak to one of our marketing specialists today to learn more about how to improve your SEO ranking and how it can help your organisation.