The world of SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimisation) can be a bit of a minefield, but we use a couple of simple rules to make sure that we stay near the top of the rankings. Here are our top 3 tips that you can use to give your website a boost yourself.
- Don’t be spammyGone are the days when filling your pages with awkwardly phrased sentences in order to cram in all your keywords would push you up the search engine rankings… in fact now there are algorithms that can detect this ‘unnatural’ use of language and you may even be penalised for it.Our best advice is to write useful content for your website visitors, help them along the way and write in plain English.
- Optimise your website titles and descriptionsIf you use a CMS (Content Management System), such as WordPress, install an SEO plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast, or All in One SEO Pack. These plugins allow you to specify what should display in your search engine listings. For example, a Google search for ‘Google’ brings up the listing below.
The text is blue at the top is your ‘Browser Title’ which also displays in the browser or tab when you visit your site. This should be below 55 characters to ensure it doesn’t get cut off on listings.The text below the link is the ‘Description’ for your page – this should be 150 – 160 characters.If you don’t use a CMS, i.e. you have HTML files that make up your website, you can still make these changes – just look for the ‘meta tags’ in the ‘<head>’ section of each file and optimise them on each page. - Include a Site MapThere are two types of site map – a web page that helps your users view all your content, and an XML file that helps search engines view all your content. Search engines love both and they’re really easy to set up.A site map is essentially a list of all the content on your website, so create a new page and add links to every other page on your site.Organise it in the same way you would organise a menu to help your users find your content. There are lots of great plugins available for WordPress that will do this for you automatically, such as Sitemap.An XML site map is much the same, although it’s formatted more to be read by computers than people. You can automatically generate an XML site map for any website using this great tool at XML-Sitemaps.com. Then all you need to do it upload the file to your hosting package. If you use WordPress, there are also lots of plugins that can do this for you automatically.
So that’s it! Our top 3 tips on things you can do yourself to give your website a little boost in the rankings. If you’d like help with this or for more information, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
