Tips To Improve Your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques are constantly changing and evolving. It can feel overwhelming and impossible to figure out which ones are important and which are safe to ignore.

The most important thing to remember is to keep the user experience in mind. Following the countless tips you’ll find online might be tempting but in the end, if your website is bad for visitors it’s bad for your business.

In this blog, I will outline some of the most important factors that go into ensuring your website will rank well in search engines.

Create Useful Content

Write with humans in mind, it’s good to fit in a lot of relevant keywords but stuffing in too many will negatively impact the user experience. When their experience is bad they click off your website and keep searching, which looks bad to Google.

Remember that search engine spiders are not the ones who will end up buying from you. If you don’t keep your human customer in mind then no amount of trickery you’ve used to impress Google crawlers will fool the eyes of the human who ends up on your website.

Don’t Plagiarise

It’s also important to note that you should make sure not to plagiarise content from other websites. If you find a great article online that would be great on your website it’s fine to take inspiration from it but don’t directly copy anything beyond simple quotes that you credit to the original author.

Search engines that view your content will have already indexed the page you’ve copied so you can’t simply get away with copying other work. If you really like another website’s content you can always link to it from your website or share it on social media. Trying to fill out your website with stolen content could actually harm your rankings.

Make Sure Your Website it Fast

A well designed website is the cornerstone of your SEO strategy. Structuring your website so that it’s as fast as possible is a process that begins at the planning phase. It can be very difficult to fix a slow website to the point that sometimes you’re better off starting over and getting a completely new one built from scratch.

Having a slow loading website is one of the worst things that can happen to your SEO rankings. It is bad within the Google algorithm and also from the perspective of user experience.

Google can track when a searcher clicks on your website link from their results page then gets bored of waiting for it to load and clicks back. This type of activity sends a strong message to search engines that your website isn’t what people want which can be disastrous for your rankings.

Don’t Forget About the Code

Correctly structuring your content with a good hierarchy of tags (in the code) will help search engines understand the structure of your website and let them know what information is most important for them to index. Search engine algorithms consider these types of details into their many ranking factors as well as certain users who can’t properly navigate your site without them.

A good tagging structure helps with accessibility as it helps the disabled as people using screen readers. They can’t see whether the text is big or small so there’s no way for them to know what you’ve visually indicated is important without other indicators.

Tag Your Images

There is an entire section of the Google results that is dedicated to only displaying images and this provides an opportunity to add keywords to your website. People often think of search engine results pages as walls of text and don’t consider that text can be attached to images.

Simple strategies like creating useful URL names and adding image tags can attach searchable text to your images in a way that accurately describes your content. If you give search spiders an easy way to identify your images’ content, it will be easier for them to index it correctly, bringing searchers to your website.