Search Engine Optimisation, known by its acronym SEO, is the practice of increasing the visitors to your website organically, by climbing to the top pages in online search results. As well as increasing the visitors to your website SEO will also improve the quality of those visitors. If you want your website to appear in internet searches then SEO is a mandatory marketing tactic.
We spoke to Graham Grieve at A1 SEO Glasgow for his top 4 tips for beginners.
Here are 4 super easy SEO tips to help you climb to the top!
1. Choose Your Key Words Carefully
SEO involves making sure that you use particular words and phrases known as ‘keywords’. The use of these keywords will improve the organic hits your website receives.
As an example, if you’re looking for a caterer in London, you will like to search Google for ‘Caterers in London’ which will bring up over 6.5 million websites. Using SEO is what makes certain businesses show on the first few pages.
Keywords are arguably the most important element of SEO. As mentioned above, they are the words and phrases that help people find your website.
There are two types of keywords; hard terms and long-tail keywords:
Hard Terms
Head terms are general, popular search terms that will consist of only one or two words. Let’s look at our previous search example. ‘London Caterers’ would be the head term. As these are very generic phrases, the search results for head terms are essentially endless.
Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are far more specific, they are made of three or more words, including the hard terms and allow a search to be narrowed down. Sticking with our example, long term keywords could be; ‘London caterers vegan wedding’ or ‘London caterers vegan Soho’. Used with hard terms, long-tail keywords are going to help the right people find your website.
So how do you know exactly which ones to use for your own website content?
Brainstorm! Sit down with a pen and paper, or your laptop and write down all of the terms that could be associated with your product, service, or brand. Next, type these words into the search bar in a search engine such as Google before you hit ‘search’ lots of suggestions should come up – these suggestions are what your potential customers and readers are looking for right now. Add those suggestions to your list! Later down the line, you can use software to help you generate your keywords.
2. Use Your Keywords
Now that you have identified which words to use, you have to use them on your website. The best places to use them are:
Page Titles & Headings
Page titles and headings even show first in internet searches, work as many keywords into your titles as possible.
Meta Descriptions
A meta description is a text that appears under your website page name during a search. This can be input by you and must contain your keywords. Make sure that this text is also clear and engaging and it will help the searcher decide if they want to click on the link and see more of your website.
Images
You can use your website images to boost SEO by working more keywords into the file image name, image titles, and the alt text.
Content
Be sure to work your keywords into the text on each of your website pages, ideally many of them should be included within the first 100 words of each page, the more pages you have the more organic hits you will potentially receive, which moves us on to our next tip . . .
3. Blogging
Purposely using SEO techniques within your blog posts will give your website far more opportunity to be found online. The more relevant, high-quality content you have, the more likely you are to climb the ranks in search engines. You can also tailor your posts to answer the questions that your customers will be searching for, for example; ‘ how to cater for a vegan diet’ or ‘ideal vegan drinks menu’. Blog posts are also easy to share on social media by yourself and your customers, the more they are shared the more your SEO will improve.
4. Links
Links carry huge importance for your website SEO, there are two main types of link; internal and external. It is important to make sure that keywords are included in these links and page titles.
Internal links
This is when parts of your website link to other pages of your own content. For example, if websites’ home page states that they are an ‘Award-winning catering’ this text could link to their blog post about their awards and achievements. You can link your blog posts to each other so that readers can explore relevant topics in more detail.
External Links
Diverting traffic away from your website can actually help build SEO in some cases. You can collaborate with other businesses to link your website to theirs and vice versa, perhaps a wedding planner would recommend a caterer in one of their posts and the caterer would return the favor. Think about your contacts and who you could work with.
It can be easy to become distracted trying to improve your website SEO, please remember at all times that your writing is for human beings and not just computer algorithms.