If you’re investing your time and money into building a website for your business, you might have thought about SEO but not be really sure what it is or how to optimise your website. There is a lot to think about from keywords, rankings to indexing pages and setting up redirects – you’re not expected to be a guru on the subject, but this blog will attempt to cover the basics that you need to think about before you start.
What is SEO?
Imagine an old school filing cabinet full of documents. Now imagine trying to find a document that you’re looking for without any labels on any of the files… Impossible right! Your website without SEO is exactly like that! Not a hope in hell of finding what you’re looking for. Labelling the individual files – which in your case is the individual pages of your website – ensures that search engines can find what they are looking for. That is effectively what SEO is – your website “Search Engine Optimised”.
What drives the Search Engines?
Simply put – the searchers do! Me and you, the people who want to find stuff. We put keywords or key phrases into search engines like Google and Bing, the engines go foraging for the answers (that big filing cabinet again) and pull out all the pages with the correct labels, or the most closely relevant.
So it’s one thing to make sure your website is SEO friendly, but it’s quite another to be effective when it comes to search engines. The key is to think about the words that your customers might use to find you in a search and use them in your content.
When should you start thinking about SEO?
Since the process of optimising is still an enigma to a lot of people, it is often something that is ‘put off till later’ – but in actual fact, you should start thinking about how to optimise your website before you write your website content! That way, you can integrate your keywords as you go – it’s much easier than trying to shoehorn them in after.
How to optimise your website
1. Think about your keywords
If you are a total newbie to SEO, just have a think about the words your audience might put into Google to find you. What would you like to show up for? This, aside from anything else, is a great place to start. Your best guess is better than nothing and no-one knows your business quite like you do. Try and avoid things like buzz words and language that maybe you would use but your customer might not. Sometimes they don’t know what they are looking for, so try to be as objective as you can.
Make a list of the keywords, phrases, and search terms that you would like your website to be found for. Ideally, attribute one keyword or phrase to each page of your website. For example, I would like to be found for ‘marketing strategy’, ‘social media marketing’, and ‘web design’, so creating a page for each of these keywords, would work for me. They form part of my service offering and are a core part of the navigation.
2. SEO plugins and built in wizards
Depending on how you built your website – whether in a web builder like Wix or using WordPress – you would have different mechanisms for optimising your website:
How to optimise your website in WordPress
WordPress uses a never ending library of “Plugins” for a huge range of functions, they control things like shop fronts, forms and of course SEO. There are developers the world over creating these things and of course lots of competition between the different choices. Yoast was the leading plugin for years before other competitors like RankMath and All In One SEO came onboard and now it’s down to personal preference – take a look at some of the reviews here.
How to optimise your website in Wix
Web builders like Wix often have special areas for SEO that allow you to add your meta descriptions and keywords simply and easily. Looking on each of the pages and the advanced settings to find this.
3. Populate the plugins and wizards
Armed with your list of keywords, you can go page by page through your website and populate the SEO sections – for example:
- Keyword/Keyphrase: “How to optimise your website”
- Page Title: How to optimise your website
- URL: how-to-optimise-your-website
- Meta Description: In this blog we explore SEO, what it is, what drives it and how to optimise your website for the search engines.
- Alt Text on your page image: How to optimise your website
4. On page optimisation
Some of the best practice advice is available from the plugin data that is provided. They provide a scoring system that evaluates your SEO score and gives you tips on what you can do to improve it. Follow this advice as far as you can but don’t worry too much if you can’t achieve top marks on all the pages. Some best practice tips on how to optimise your website page:
- Write good quality content – think about why a reader would like to land on your page, add value
- Include the keyword in the Header 1 – there should only ever be one H1 – also incorporate it into H2, H3, etc where possible.
- Make sure your article or page uses header hierarchy
- Put your keyword in the body of your text but don’t overdo it, it needs to read naturally
- Ensure your keyword is used in the first paragraph
- Incorporate hyperlinks to other pages within your website and if you can reference other website as external links add value too
5. Other website ranking factors
Site speed
Alongside what your website says and how your content is measured, the search engines are also looking for a website that is going to be fast and generate a good experience for the searcher. You can influence site speed by ensuring your hosting space is adequate for your needs. For example, if you have a site with a lot of images, you might need a larger hosting space to accommodate those extra bytes and that would help you speed up performance. You should also be mindful to reduce the size of your images before you upload them. Keeping them below 500kb will ensure you don’t have too many slow loading and clunky pages.
User experience
Search engines will also judge your website performance based on how long your visitors stay engaged on your website, so you need to make it easy for them to do this. This involves making sure your navigation is clear and logical, you have clear call to actions and your audience knows exactly what to do next, you reduce annoying distractions like popups for example (use sparingly) and make sure you make your site readable, nice simple fonts, good contrast and plenty of white space.
If in doubt, seek help
Hopefully these tips will give you a great start on understanding how to optimise your website, but if in doubt it’s always a good idea to seek help from the professionals. Optimising your website isn’t a one-time thing – it’s an ongoing process. By focusing on the things in this blog, you’ll create a site that ranks well, provides a great user experience, and supports your business growth.
Take it step by step, and keep refining as you go. Your website is one of your most valuable business assets – make it work for you!
