5 Easy Ways To Improve Search Engine Optimization
While it may often seem strange and unintuitive to industry newcomers, SEO is actually relatively straightforward. Despite constant revisions to the search engine algorithms used to rank websites, optimizing a site can still be achieved with quick and easy changes that often follow principles of common-sense.
These five tips should enable any website to improve its ranking results compared to rivals.
Ask friends and colleagues to thoroughly test your site.
It’s easy to assume that everything looks (and works) well, but there are often glitches lurking beyond the homepage. Perhaps there’s a piece of Adobe Flash content that won’t display on smartphones and tablets. Or maybe certain pages load slowly on mobile browsers – a factor that search engines take into account when ranking sites. Broken links might cause sites to be downgraded in future rankings, along with uncompressed or missing images.
Regularly publish keyword-filled content.
You don’t need to be a professional writer to populate a website with relevant content. All you need to know is which terms your customers typically search for in Google and Bing, before sprinkling these words and phrases throughout news stories or blog posts. A blog is ideal for this because each entry can focus on a specific product or service. The longer people spend on your site, the more search engines will regard it as a useful resource worth promoting.
Exploit page elements.
If you employ an SEO guru, they will check for the presence of page titles, image tags and captions. These snippets of text play a surprisingly big role in page rankings since they tell the crawlers used by Google and Bing what people might expect to find at that location. Frontload captions or tags with keywords based on your research from point 2, to augment body text. It’s also advisable to create a sitemap, providing the crawlers with a concise summary of your site’s layout.
Build links.
If you have good relationships with a partner company, suggest creating reciprocal links to each other’s sites. Publish your company’s details in web directories, or anywhere a link to the homepage is permitted. Inbound links are a key factor in SEO ranking, but so are outbound ones to reputable platforms. Links to articles published by the New York Times or the BBC provide search engines with a sense of relevancy and trust. Used in moderation, these outward links are very helpful.
Harness Midphase’s SEO Guru package.
Our SEO Guru service has been designed to take the stress out of website optimization. Stage one involves a detailed site scan and a comprehensive performance report, indicating areas of improvement. We walk users through the more complex improvement processes, before providing ongoing site analysis and performance monitoring. Available in Business or Business Plus (for growing and larger companies respectively), every SEO Guru package includes keyword ranking reports and competitor analysis. It’s the only SEO tool you need.