10 tips to improve your websites SEO

 

Tablo reader up chevron

Free SEO tips

Most companies or bloggers want more relevant visitors to their website. Traffic from the search engines are often of a high quality as they often have a specific need. Either looking for some information, a specific product or service. Because of the importance of Google traffic more and more are using a lot of time and money on SEO compared to other types of online marketing. Here are 10 tips you can use to make your website stand out on the search engines and hopefully get you more quality traffic from Google.

Read more - The 2020 SEO Guide

Tip 1 - Start with a keyword analysis

Without a good understand of which keywords people use when they are looking for the things you are offering it's impossible to plan a good SEO strategy.
To begin with keyword analysis use your existing Google Account or create a new and open a free account on Google Ads - ads.google.com 
Here you can access the Keyword planner tool under tools which can help you find the most relevant keywords for your industri.

Open the keyword planner tool and type in the keywords you think people are using to find your products/services.
Google when then show how many monthly searches there are for that specific keyword or search term.
In addition to this if will often also show similar keywords that people are also searching for. 
Use this to build a long list of the most relevant keywords for your website.
Check the competition for each keyword, and it all the listing on page one are large well known companies the competition is most likely to hard for that keyword.. put it on hold to a later time and focus on some of the easier keywords to begin with.
No point in using a lot of time or money on SEO for keywords you arn't going to rank for anytime soon. You may as well use Google Ads to get some traffic from those keywords.

Read more: SEO and Google Ads

Tip 2 - Create relevant landing pages

In order to rank for a specific keyword, you will need a webpage that is optimized for that specific keyword. For instance if you got  a webdesign company and want people to find you when searching for webdesign <your city> you will most likely need a page about webdesign where you mention your city on a few times. If you don't already have a landing page for a keyword you will have to make one.
Usually it's a good idea to only focus on 1 (or 2-3 other very related keywords) on the same page.
Use that keyword in the title tag of your webpage, in the headings and in the body text on the page. 
Long pages are often easier to rank than pages with thin content.

Adding videos, good meta descriptions and pictures can be a good tool to improve rankings even more, as they increase user engagement.

Read more: Top SEO companies

Tip 3 - Optimize your website

Having a great content and landing pages isn't enough to rank for more competitive keywords. Here's it's also important that you have a well optimized website. For instance there's a huge difference when it comes to SEO if you are using an url like CoolCompany.com/p=1323 or an url such as CoolCompany.com/webdesign-and-seo.

Be sure that there are not any links on your website that leads to removed content or webpages that no longer exists. Optimize your website for mobile deviced and make sure it loads fast. These are also important SEO factors here in 2020.

Tip 4 - Optimize your content

Go through the various landing pages you created easier on your website and optimize the content on these pages. Be sure to use the main keywords in headings, image Alt tags, title tag and about 0.5-2% in the main body text. But try not to over optimize as there's a fine balance between great SEO content and over optimized trash. When creating content write to the human users and not the search engines.

Tip 5 - Use canonical URL's

Quite ofte you will end up having 2 or more pages with almost identical content or content that is also used on another domain. For instance if you have a webshop with similar products in different colors or sizes. Here you can use the canonical tag to tell the search engines that this page is almost identify to the page you link to with the canonical tag. This way you avoid a potential duplicated content penalty.

 

Tip 6 - Get relevant backlinks

One of the most important factors in SEO are backlinks. When someone links back to your website it a vote for your website in the eyes of Google. Especially if the site linking to yours is in the same industri as your website. And even better if it's a large well known site. If you are selling fashion clothing, getting a link from Prada or Gucci's website would certainly boost your rankings quite a bit.

Tip 7 - Focus on dofollow links

A backlink isn't just a backlink. A lot of places where you can get a link from automatically ads a nofollow tag to the link (Wikipedia is one of those sites). This basically tells the search engine not to count this link, effectively removing any effect it has. You can check if a link is a nofollow link but hovering the mouse over a link and click on inspect element. If you see a rel="nofollow" tag there, it's a nofollow and not much very useful for you.

Tip 8 - Go slow

You may be tempted to rush into this and start creating tons of backlinks, or even using somekind of SEO tool to automatically create a bizillion links to your website. Don't fall into this trap. While this was an effective SEO strategy back in the old days, it's likely to hurt your rankings more than it improves them these days.
For new sites make 1-2 links a day, for older days you can go a little higher. 

Tip 9 - don't stop once you reach your goals

You may be tempted to stop all search engine optimization once you are ranking well on Google for your main keywords, and in some niches you may even get away with this. But most of the time you will need to maintain your SEO - update your content a little bit now and then, add new backlinks a few times a month. This also reduces the chance that some competetitor suddenly outranks with little work.

Tip 10 - track your rankings

There's a lot of tools out there which you can use to track the effort of your SEO and see where your website are ranking for a certain keyword. Tools like Accuranker, SEMrush ect. but most of these tools cost money to use. There's a few free tools out there, but you will get a better result with the paid once. If you are serious about your websites SEO I would recommend you get a premium rank tracker.

This is all for now, hope you enjoyed reading this SEO book and can use these 10 SEO tips to improve your websites visibility on the search engines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...
~

You might like Michael Nielsen's other books...