Search engine optimisation is a specialised online skill that only SEO practitioners know. The good news, though, is that these SEO experts are not too selfish to keep all the learnings to themselves. Even if you don’t have any idea what SEO is and how to go about it, you can simply search the web for tips, tricks, and best practices, and you can eventually master the art of search engine optimisation, as well.
SEO is all about making your website visible online and getting it to rank on search engine results page. It particularly answers the question, “How do I get my website to rank on page one of Google (or other search engines)?” If you are a website owner and you are asking the same thing, here are 20 quick SEO tips that might help you.
The most important SEO strategies you should know
- First and foremost, you need to have a website that you can manage and optimize. While there are a lot of free platforms that enable users to create their own websites, these can be very limiting and difficult to optimise. Opt for your own domain name.
- Keywords are important. You need to identify a specific keyword or key phrase that you want your website to rank for when users type it on Google. Examples of this are “dental services in Sydney” and “web development Australia”.
- Make sure that your website’s content contains your chosen keyword or key phrase.
- Make sure that your website provides complete and useful information that are relevant to your visitors.
- Fill out the title tag and meta description of each page of your website. Make sure that they contain keywords and are unique for each page.
- Avoid heavy images and animations on your site. Opt for a website that loads fast and is easy to navigate.
- Do not complicate things. To understand the competitive nature of your industry, search for websites similar to yours and look for ideas that you can apply to your own website.
- Create a clear and organize site architecture that you will follow. Include the basic and important pages, and remove those that do not provide any useful information.
- Text on images cannot be read by search engines. If you want your keywords to work for you, opt for textual content, instead of graphics.
- Make sure your website’s links are all working.
- Include a blog section on your website and regularly update it with fresh, new blog posts.
- Backlinks are important. You can ask people in your industry or clients and suppliers who is happy with your services to link to your website.
- You can also submit the URL of your website to directories such as Yellow Pages to increase backlinks.
- For every update you make on your website, ping search engines so they can crawl and index the changes you made on your site.
- Take advantage of free tools such as Google Analytics, Google Webmasters Tool, and Google my Business to fully monitor the performance of your website.
- Build a user-friendly CMS website which you can update easily by yourself. You do not want to wait for web developers or pay them each time you want to make a change. WordPress is an excellent web platform that comes with easy-to-manage dashboard.
- Ensure your website works on all devices as more than 50% of searches happens with mobile devices.
- Monitor the performance of your website and see how well you do on your target keywords. If there are other related keywords that you are ranking for, take advantage of them, too.
- Promote your website offline, as well. Include the URL of your website on marketing collateral such as business cards, notepads, pens, umbrellas, stickers, and other items.
- Avoid any black hat SEO techniques. They will not only harm your website’s rankings, but will also deem all your efforts useless.
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