10 Essential SEO Tips To Optimise Your Site & Boost Traffic
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process that improves a site's organic search engine results (SERPs) and, thus, its website traffic. This optimisation can include content optimisation (optimising text and images), website structure (search engine-friendly URLs), and link building (referring external pages to your own).
There's no doubt that SEO has changed radically over the past decade – and with good reason.
A website without SEO isn't just lousy marketing; it's an outright waste of time and money. More than 1 billion websites exist, and search engines only have so much space to index, so they need to ensure every site gets an opportunity to be listed.
If you've struggled to make your site rank higher on Google, you need to read this article. Here, I'll share with you ten essential SEO tips that you should be using to optimise your site. These tips are simple to implement and will give you the edge you need to make your site a success.
Table of Contents
1 – Target Relevant Primary and Secondary Keywords
Targeting relevant primary keywords is the best way to get to the top of the SERPs.
Keywords are the key to any website, including your website. They are what search engines use to determine what your website is about. Targeting primary keywords specific to your business, industry, and topic is essential.
It's also a good idea to target secondary keywords. These are keywords that describe your primary keywords, like “how to create a landing page.” By targeting both primary and secondary keywords, you maximise the likelihood that your site will appear near the top of the results.
Remember to include keywords in the title tag and meta description when optimising for keywords. For instance, if you're selling a product online, your primary keyword might be “product.” You could also target keywords like “product review,” “product comparison,” and “best product.”
How to Choose Relevant Keywords
Start by thinking about what your ideal customer is looking for and what they would search for if they needed help with a particular problem. If you're selling products, think about how your ideal customer would go about buying a product.
Once you know what your target audience is searching for, use free tools like Google's Keyword Planner to see which words and phrases people are using to search for.
This tool tells you how often people search for a specific keyword. It also shows you the keywords driving traffic to your site and how competitive they are.
Using the information you've gathered, choose the most popular keywords and build your list of keywords around them. If your list is too broad, you'll likely have poor SEO.
Consider this example: if your goal is to sell an ebook, your target audience might be people who want to create a business. In that case, you might start with the words “create a business” and “business planning.”
But if your target audience is parents who need to teach their children to read, you might start with words like “parenting,” “teaching,” and “reading.”
Ultimately, your keyword list will vary based on your target audience.
Use these primary and secondary keywords in your title tags and meta descriptions. They should be relevant to your site's content and your audience. In addition, they should appear early in the title. The first 100 characters are the most important, so try to fill that space with keywords.
2 – Create Quality Content
If you're in any marketing, you must create quality content for your site. Your audience wants to read and see information that they enjoy and that answers their questions.
Regarding online search, Google and other search engines want to give searchers great content that meets their needs. If you have terrible content, it won't matter how many times you place keywords on your site. If you don't have good content, it won't matter how much you spend on PPC advertising.
Quality Content and Quality Keywords
There are plenty of ways to create quality content on your site. These include articles, blogs, and videos. In general, the more of this type of content you can produce, the better off you'll be regarding search engine optimisation.
It's possible to have too much of a good thing, so balancing quantity with quality is crucial. You'll get better results by having only five or ten high-quality monthly posts on your site rather than one hundred poorly written pieces.
To know what you're doing, you need to know what's working and isn't. Google Analytics is the easiest way to measure your success.
Google Analytics is an extension of your website and helps you to measure your performance. It provides a complete breakdown of your site's use and valuable information about your site's visitors.
You can access the same data through your Google My Business page. While it doesn't have the detail that Google Analytics does, it gives a quick snapshot of the number of visits, clicks, and pages visitors view.
It's also easy to track your success using Google AdWords. This is a free service that lets you bid on keywords. You can also set up conversion tracking for your website, which tells you which pages are leading to conversions.
When you set up your account, you'll be able to choose to set specific goals. For example, you can specify that you want to drive traffic to a specific page or to increase the number of people who convert into leads.
It's a great way to improve your keyword strategy. Start by determining what types of keywords you should be targeting. Once you've figured out what terms your audience uses to search, use them as the basis for your keyword research.
Keyword research is a vital part of SEO. Google and other search engines want to provide searchers with quality content they can trust. Getting the basics of SEO right makes it easier for your target audience to find your site.
SEO is one of the most effective ways to grow your business. If you're trying to decide whether to hire a freelancer or do it yourself, consider some things before you choose one.
- Amazon Kindle Edition
- Clarke, Adam (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 264 Pages – 09/09/2014 (Publication Date) – Digital Smart Publishing (Publisher)
3 – Format Content for Search Engines & Featured Snippets
Featured snippets allow Google to present snippets of information in search results, such as a summary of the website that appeared in Google's Knowledge Graph. The snippets include links to the complete article and act as a link to the source material.
Google displays the snippet in its Knowledge Panel (a box that appears on top of the search results page) when it thinks the content is significant enough to warrant it. These snippets are most often used by people who are actively searching for a specific topic and want to see an answer quickly.
You can help Google serve the most relevant content to users' queries with featured snippets. This makes your site more discoverable and increases click-through rates.
Google displays snippets automatically and can update them based on how many times the snippet is clicked.
What Does Featured Snippet Mean for SEO?
Featured snippets improve SEO by increasing the likelihood that a user will click through to your page. According to the Marketmuse Blog, Google uses a complex algorithm to determine whether you should include a page in a Knowledge Panel. It looks at factors, including your site's domain authority, page ranking, and the quality of the page's content.
For example, a high-quality, unique, well-written page could help Google distinguish your site from other pages with similar content. It's vital to ensure your page is optimised for search and to provide valuable content to users.
If you're worried about having duplicate content on your site, don't worry. Google will crawl a featured snippet and not your regular content. The snippet will not be duplicated across your site, so it doesn't violate Google's guidelines.
You Can Use Featured Snippets on Multiple Pages
You can use the same snippet on multiple pages on your website. Google will index the snippet on every page where it appears.
Example: You can create two featured snippets. One is for the home page; the other is for the About Us page.
Example: You can create a featured snippet for your company, product, or service. This makes it easier for users to find your business or product.
Example: You can create a featured snippet for an article or blog post on your site. The snippet helps your visitors find the content, and you'll increase click-throughs to your page.
4 – Optimise Your Page Title and Meta Description
When someone searches for your business name online, they want to know more about your business. That's why optimising your page title and meta description is essential.
As a rule of thumb, optimise the title for search engines first, followed by the meta description. The meta description should generally be shorter, descriptive, and include keywords.
What Are Page Titles and Meta Descriptions?
A page title and meta description are two pieces of information that appear when you visit a web page.
Page titles and descriptions appear in the browser window. They're usually displayed at the top of the browser window, below the URL address.
These snippets of text appear on search results pages in a search engine, where people go to find businesses online. They're also displayed on Facebook and LinkedIn when people click on your profile.
Google's algorithm takes both into account to rank your site. So, the better your page title and meta description are, the higher your site will appear in search results.
How to Optimise Your Page Title and Meta Description?
Optimising your page title and meta description requires a little bit of research and experimentation. Try different variations on your page title, meta description, and URL.
You want to include your targeted keywords in the page title and meta description. In addition, you may want to use images in your page title and meta description.
For example, if your company name is The Amazing Company, you can try something like this:
- Amazing Company – The best-selling product of all time
- Amazing Company – World-class brand
- The Best Selling Product of All Time – Amazing Company
Remember, it's your business, so it's your call whether your page title and meta description are catchy or boring.
5 – Generate Backlinks from Authority Websites
Authority websites offer quality content that's worth linking to. They've been around a while and established themselves as authority sites on a subject. They tend to get lots of traffic, so they're often among the top-performing sites on Google.
To generate links to authority sites, you need to find out which of them is authoritative for a particular keyword. Once you've identified a good authority site, you can build a list of its articles and find out where to link from. This process will take a few hours and might require much research.
Once you've done all this, you can use the information you collected to create a custom backlink profile. A backlink profile is a set of backlinks to websites. Each backlink in the profile is weighted based on factors like quality, quantity, and the location of the backlink. You can then use this profile to get backlinks from sites with high-quality backlinks, using software such as Moz or Ahrefs.
The best authority sites rank well on Google for terms they cover, which means they're authoritative for those topics. This creates opportunities to get backlinks to your website but also makes it difficult to compete with those sites.
Why Do Backlinks Matter?
Backlinks are essential to search engines because they sign that your content is valuable and trustworthy—a backlink to your site signals to Google that it should rank your site higher. Backlinks aren't the only signal Google uses to rank your site, but they're crucial.
Google's algorithm assesses your content's value and then ranks it accordingly. Links to your website show that your content is good, and they tell Google that your website is valuable. If your content is good and your backlinks are strong, your website will rank better for keywords related to your content.
For example, let's say you write a guide on the best way to do something. You want to rank for this term, so you optimise your website. You post this guide on a few authoritative websites and build a list of those websites. Whenever someone links to one of these sites, it's a backlink to your content. Your backlinks are like votes for your content.
You can also use the backlinks you build to your website to get more backlinks. For instance, if your site is new, you could send out emails to a mailing list or social media network and ask them to link to your site.
This way, you build your backlinks and get more people to link to your site. It's an excellent strategy to help your site rank on Google, but it's essential to know that it's not easy. It would be best to work, but the rewards are great.
- French, Garrett (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 282 Pages – 01/14/2020 (Publication Date) – Entrepreneur Press (Publisher)
How Do You Find High-Quality Backlinks?
Finding backlinks is part art, part science. You need to find authoritative websites that have many quality backlinks, and you need to find them quickly.
If you're looking for backlinks, you will need some sort of database. For instance, you could create a spreadsheet with a column for each website. Each row would include the URL of the website, its date of creation, and the number of backlinks it has.
You'll learn how to identify authoritative sites as you start doing this. You'll also notice that some sites are much more authoritative than others. Some sites may be very well-known and highly ranked, but they don't have many backlinks.
Other sites may have fewer backlinks than they should have. A simple way to determine which websites are authoritative is to look at Alexa. Alexa is a web traffic measurement tool that shows the popularity of websites.
Alexa ranks sites based on the time people spend on the site. The sites that receive the most traffic have the most authority.
When you find a site that seems authoritative, you'll want to know why people are linking to it. It could be a blog post, an article, a video, or a page on their site. You need to check these sources to see why people link them.
In other words, you need to find out if the site is an authority on the topic or not. If it is, you need to find out which topics it covers.
The next step is to build a list of those topics. Once you've identified the authoritative topics for a given keyword, you can find the websites that cover those topics.
You'll want to find those websites by researching their domain name. Many sites, like YouTube or Wikipedia, are built on a single idea.
6 – Remove Anything That Slows the Website
The faster a website loads, the better its search rankings for search engines. A website that loads slowly means the search engine has to spend more time analysing its content, decreasing its ability to rank websites similar to yours. This can cause a snowball effect, where the slowest website on a site is ranked lower than websites that load quickly, causing it to load even slower, and so on.
One solution to improve a website's speed is to optimise its images and resources. You should optimise images for web page speed, such as reducing image file sizes and removing unnecessary data. You should also compress CSS and JavaScript files to maximise their speed.
Another option is to add a CDN (content delivery network). CDNs improve the speed of your site by moving resources from the server to the user. The resources are cached locally on the user's device and then delivered to the browser.
Third-party companies usually provide CDNs, so your site will need to add the CDN provider to your pages. The CDN provider will handle the work of caching and delivering the resources.
The third option is to use Cloudflare. Cloudflare adds security to your website and makes it easier for users to find and navigate through your site. It can be added to your site using the free Cloudflare account. Once Cloudflare is on your site, it will automatically ensure its loading speed and security.
Other resources that can improve your site's performance include optimising your site's code and images, using compression tools, and using responsive design.
How Can I Add A Cloudflare CDN?
Cloudflare adds a free CDN to your site, which makes it easier for your users to find and navigate through your site. It is a straightforward process to add Cloudflare to your site.
Visit the Cloudflare website, and create an account. After signing in, click the button to Add a Page. Add the page URL to the textbox, and select the Cloudflare domain name from the dropdown menu. Click the Create button, and wait for the page to be processed.
On the Cloudflare website, click Add-ons. Scroll down to the CDN section, and select the Cloudflare CDN.
Click the Activate button on the Cloudflare dashboard.
Your Cloudflare CDN is now activated. You can use the Cloudflare console to view your site's stats and customise the service for your needs.
Does Cloudflare Work With WordPress?
Yes, Cloudflare's WordPress integration works with all the WordPress plugins that support the HTTP/2 standard.
To begin with, you will need to set up your Cloudflare account and then configure your site.
From the Cloudflare Dashboard, go to Settings. Select the WordPress plugin, and scroll to the bottom of the page to the “Additional Plugins” section.
In the Additional Plugins section, enter the domain name of your website and select Enable Cloudflare.
This will enable the plugin, and Cloudflare will then provide the WordPress plugin with the necessary instructions to make your site work with Cloudflare.
7 – Optimise Your Graphics
Today, more people search on mobile devices than desktop computers. This is why it's essential to ensure your website is optimised for both. Search engine optimisation is a process that involves making changes to your website to improve its ranking on search engines such as Google. When Googlebot crawls your website, it's looking for keywords or phrases to rank your site.
Here's how to optimise your graphics for SEO:
Optimise image file names
This is the first thing Googlebot will see. Make sure your image filenames are clear and concise. If you don't already have unique filenames, use short and descriptive filenames that include your keyword. For example, a web page that lists five images might have the filenames img1, img2, img3, img4, and img5.
Make sure your filenames don't look like URLs. Use hyphens, spaces, and punctuation marks. Avoid using words that are difficult for people to read, such as acronyms, abbreviations, numbers, and other characters that are hard to see.
Optimise image size
Image sizes can affect your site's loading speed, which is vital for Googlebot. The maximum image size should be about 2 megabytes or 2,000 kilobytes. However, it would help if you aimed to keep your images under 1 megabyte.
Ensure that your images display in full-screen mode. This will help Googlebot to download your images faster.
Add alt text to images
Alt text is displayed in place of an image if your user doesn't have images on their browser. Make sure your alt text describes your images. Keep in mind that the alt text is not visible to humans.
Use descriptive alt text
If you don't know what your image means, it may be helpful to ask your photographer. Also, you can search for the terms that describe your image on Google to find similar images.
Avoid including sensitive information
You don't want your visitors or search engines to discover that you're selling an item, hosting a classified ad, or displaying a coupon code. So, removing personal data, such as your phone number or email address, is best removed from your alt text.
8 – Conduct Regular SEO Audits
We would all like to think that our websites are being searched for regularly and that search engines are finding our websites. However, this isn't always the case.
A great way to identify your website's SEO strengths and weaknesses are to conduct a monthly or quarterly audit. This is the process of evaluating the performance of your website by tracking and measuring the number of times your website shows up for specific keywords.
SEO audits aim to determine whether your website is performing according to the specifications you outlined in your SEO strategy.
The first step in conducting your SEO audits is determining what keywords you want to track. You should consider which keywords or phrases your target audience uses to find your website. Then, you need to establish keyword-specific goals that you want to measure.
The next step is to identify the best tools for your specific needs. Tools include Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, and Moz. Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to see how many visits are coming to your site, the percentage of visitors clicking through to a different page, and the time spent on your website.
Moz is a paid tool that helps you discover keywords your customers search for to find your website. You can use Moz's Keyword Explorer to enter keywords you want to track. These keywords will appear in Google's search results and help you determine which pages your customers are clicking on.
Keyword Planner is a free tool that allows you to enter keywords relevant to your website and receive suggestions from Moz about improving your search engine rankings.
The next step is to ensure you know where your website is located. This means that you need to understand your domain name and your website address.
Next, use the keywords you want to track in your website's URL. Your URL should be short and easy to remember. If you do not use a domain, use a memorable name for your website, such as “www.best-cheap-airfare.com”.
Finally, use your chosen keywords as the basis for your SEO strategy. This includes using keywords in the title, meta, and heading tags.
There are two significant steps to an SEO audit. The first is to analyse your website traffic. The second is to check the performance of your website and make changes to improve it.
Analysing Traffic
The first step is to analyse your traffic by looking at a period. For example, you may compare your website traffic on Mondays to Fridays versus weekends. You could compare the first month to the same period last year.
You will need to set goals based on your current performance. For example, if you are seeing a steady decline in your search engine rankings, your goal is to increase your traffic. If your traffic has been steadily increasing, your goal is to maintain or improve the level of traffic you are receiving.
You will need to use a combination of Google Analytics and Moz. You can then use the information to make changes to your SEO strategy.
- Williams, Dr. Andy (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 290 Pages – 02/12/2021 (Publication Date) – Independently published (Publisher)
Checking the Performance of Your Website
Once you have analysed your website traffic, you will need to look at your website performance. This means looking at the pages that your website generates. In other words, which pages of your website are driving traffic to your site?
It's important to note that search engines, including Google, favour high-quality content. Therefore, you may need to change your strategy to make your content more valuable to your target audience.
You can also analyse your SEO performance by measuring the percentage of visitors that click through to your website's landing page. You can use a tool such as Google Analytics to see how often visitors click through from the search results page.
This is important because if your website is not converting visitors into customers, it is unlikely that your SEO strategy will work.
How Long Does it Take to Run an SEO Audit?
The average time it takes to run an SEO audit is 20 minutes. You can speed up the process by creating a spreadsheet of all the keywords and metrics you need to track.
Another way to speed up the process is to set goals before you begin. By setting the goals before you start, you can see whether or not they are successful before the audit has started.
There are various tools you can use, but here are two of the most commonly used tools:
- Google Analytics – This free tool allows you to see how many visitors are coming to your website, the percentage of visitors clicking through to your website's landing page, and the time spent on your website.
- Semrush – This paid tool allows you to enter keywords you want to track and receive suggestions about improving your search engine rankings.
9 – Study Your Competitors
People often ask me why they should study their competitors for SEO. I would answer that by saying this: when it comes to ranking on Google, the world is divided into two classes: those who are interested and those who are not.
If your goal is to have your website rank high on Google, then studying your competitors is essential. But not just any type of studying. You need to study them the right way. You must study your competitors the right way because they might eventually become your competitors if you copy them.
And in case you didn't know, it's pretty much impossible for Google to see all the information about your site on the Internet and rank you accordingly.
So, if you want to be the top performer in the market, you need to do more than copy. You need to understand your market, its needs, and what it does and doesn't like. And for this, it's imperative to do proper competitor research.
The first thing you need to do is find websites that are similar to yours. To do this, you need to find out their domain names, and you also need to learn more about the keywords that they use on their sites.
Once you've found the keywords being used, it's time to check the search volumes. This is a significant step, as you must understand the competitive landscape and how your site stacks up.
Another thing that you need to do is to check out the kind of content that they have. You need to understand the topics that are being discussed on their pages, and you need to know what kinds of articles they are publishing.
One more thing you need to do is get a complete understanding of the backlinks they are getting. You need to figure out how many of the backlinks are working and which ones are not.
When it comes to competitor research, you must know what your competitors are doing. And this means that you need to know the exact details.
You need to know the content of their site, the type of articles they publish, and what kind of links they are getting. This way, you'll be able to know if they are doing what they say they are doing.
And once you have the answers, it's time to take your strategy to the next level. If you know what your competitors are doing, it's easy to do something similar.
But it's more than that. If you study your competitors the right way, you'll know that they are not the only ones who are successful.
You'll know that other companies are ranking well. This way, you'll be able to get new ideas on the things that you can do to help your company rise up the ranks.
You need to know what your competitors are doing and study them the right way. If you don't, you might waste time and energy, and your business might suffer.
You need to be smart, and you need to be careful.
10 – Use a Mix of Internal and External Links
If you want to maximise your SEO traffic, you need to make sure that you use both internal and external links to your content.
It doesn't matter whether you have an online business; everyone uses links to drive visitors to their site. When you link to other sites, the search engines read that text and consider the link's value, the site's quality, and the page the link leads to.
Links from high-quality sites impact your rankings more than those from low-quality sites. This is one of the reasons why the best link-building strategies focus on quality, not quantity.
In addition to that, links from external sites increase your site's credibility. When Google finds that your site has been linked, it increases its trust in your content.
So how do you get high-quality links? Start by adding the following link elements to your pages:
Internal links
This includes links to other site pages, such as the navigation menu links. You should create these links from the headings on the pages you're linking to. For example, you could create links from the navigation menus on the homepage and then within each section.
You can also add these links to the footer, sidebar, or wherever else they'll be displayed. These links are also known as “breadcrumbs”.
External links
These links are used to drive traffic to other sites. They don't increase the number of links that you have, but they do increase your ranking. They're typically done in a variety of ways.
For example, you could write an article on your site that you then share on social media and include the URL to the post. You could also submit it to article directories and ask your network to link to it. You could also promote it on your blog or social media accounts and ask your followers to follow the link back to your site.
External links are called “link building” and are the bread and butter of SEO campaigns.
When Should You Use Internal and External Links?
While links to your site can and should be added to your pages, it's best to avoid using links to your homepage. That's because the homepage is typically the most crucial page on your site, so visitors are likely to click on it and go straight to the page they're looking for.
Links from less important pages, like the homepage, can dilute your brand and lead to losing a potential customer.
On the other hand, adding links to your homepage, footer, and sidebar is usually a good idea. These pages are less essential but likely to be seen by visitors and lead to critical pages.
Links to your homepage will increase Google's trust in your site since it's where most people will land. And links in your navigation menu and footer will lead them to the essential pages of your site.
Conclusion
SEO is often described as ‘the art and science of ensuring your website is visible in the search engines.' This is true, but it's a little more complicated than that.
There are several different types of SEO. The term ‘organic' SEO refers to how Google, Bing and other search engines find, rank and display websites.
The SEO strategies I've shown you are some of the best practices to help your site rise in rankings. If you can master these, you'll see your traffic increase and sales rise.
Read this article to learn more about SEO and how it can help you!
Last update on 2024-05-13 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
