Many people may not know what SEO stands for, but they will be familiar with it in some way. The acronym stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is a technique used to improve the visibility of your website on search engines such as Google. If you want more traffic to your website then you should take these 29 quick ways to improve your SEO! I have ranked them in order of importance (as I perceive it) – so you don’t need to do everything here, but hopefully, you’ll do enough to improve your ranking!
Through the following tips, you will be able to improve your SEO and have a website that is indexed more highly by search engines. Note: these are just some of the ways in which you can increase traffic on your site.
Tip #1: Do your keyword research
What is a keyword? A keyword is a word or a phrase that someone may type into a search engine to search for something. In most cases this is a phrase – for example the keyword – build a website for free – this ‘keyword’ is viewed 90,000 times per month globally!
Place your keywords in the title and headings of pages to improve visibility on search engines – for example, I have used ‘keyword’ twice in this blog post.
”Keywords are a must when it comes to SEO.” To find out more about keyword research, check out my blog post.
Tip #2: Don’t forget to include keywords in your content! Make sure that the title, heading and meta description are all keyword-rich. Install an SEO plugin. Plugins such as Yoast, Rank Math and All in One SEO can be a very easy way to get started with this aspect of website creation for beginners (and experienced professionals).
Tip #3: You should never use keywords more than once in the same sentence! If you do it will look unnatural and Google will penalise your site for keyword stuffing – which is not something you want.
Tip #4: Make sure that your site is mobile friendly and fully responsive. Google likes to see that!
Tip #5: Make sure that your site is fully optimised for speed. You don’t want users falling off because your site is loading too slowly! It’s best to get this right from the beginning, but if you haven’t – first run a page speed test through GTMetrix, study the waterfall and this should give you an indication of where you need to make amendments.
Tip #6: Make sure that your navigation is clear and that you’ve included internal links on your site – this will help users stay on your site longer.
Tip #7: Make sure that you are verified on search engines. It’s surprising to see that a quarter of the US population search on Bing. If you don’t verify, then they all could be lost!
Tip #8: Submit your sitemap into Google Search and Google Analytics. An SEO plugin will generate your sitemap for you. Google Search Console will allow you to keep track of visitors to your site and also alert you to where they are potentially dropping off. this will allow you that track how visitors are coming to your site, where they are falling off and your bounce rate. Use Google Analytics so you can see what people are actually looking at and click on – if they’re not clicking then make sure there’s enough call to action (CTA) buttons pointing them.
Tip #9: If you’re a local business make sure that you have submitted to all directories in your area such as Google Business, Yelp etc., this will ensure that your business gets found in the local search results.
Tip #:10 Businesses with a physical address should have it on their site to give them legitimacy. Adding Google Maps is another way that customers can find you online!
Tip#11: If you serve an area wider than your own locality, it’s a good idea to create landing pages for those areas. Also, landing pages can be created for each product you sell. Landing pages are not part of your menu, they are simply pages that allow you to create honed in SEO content, eg., say you are a web designer and you want to serve a wider area, you can create a landing page with each town/area in the title (H1), so if someone puts in a google search for that area, there’s a decent probability that you will show up first.
Tip #12: Look at your competitor’s websites and see how they are optimising their website for SEO. This will give you some insight into what is working, as well as inspire ideas of other things to include in your own optimisation efforts. Use tools such as spyfu to check them out! Don’t copy though – this will not help!
Tip #13: The best way to get people onto your website is with a blog! Make one and promote it well so readers know what they are reading about when they come across it on social media or other websites. Use your keywords in your blog – but don’t overdo it, remember, you don’t want to keyword stuff either!! And make sure that your keywords are in the title.
Tip #14: Frequently link back to other posts which provide valuable and also link to other sites with domain authority. What is domain authority (DA)? DA is a measure of how well-known and trusted your site or webpage is. A domain with high authority will rank higher in the search results than one with little to none. Create backlinks from authoritative sites. This means you want to create backlinks from a site with high domain authority and also make sure the content on this link is related to your website so it makes sense for people who click that link. This part can be tricky, but hopefully, with some good content and a bit of putting yourself out there, you may find a way! If it’s a DA in your area, offer to write a blog post for them, you’ll never know until you try!
Tip #15: Create social media accounts and keep them up to date! This means visit them at least once a week and respond to any comments or post replies you may get from followers, this way they know you’re still alive and are interested enough in what is going on. Although social media is not an SEO tool, it can help you get more traffic to your website.
Tip #16: Use social media to your advantage! Social Media is an excellent place for SEO. You can use it in two ways: the first way will be using hashtags on pictures, posts and videos – this means that people who search for these words will find you; the second one being a paid advertising campaign that gets your content and links out there.
Tip #17: Create user-friendly URLs. You should create short but memorable URLs for readers – this is better for SEO as well! For example – your about page, don’t just have mysite.com/about – have something a bit more meaningful like mysite.com/about-how-i-build-a-website-for-free.
Tip #18: Check how your site stands from a functional and set up point of view with tools such as seobility.net. To be competitive, you must learn about HTML tags such as H1s and H2s.
Tip #19: Make sure that if there are any images on your site, they have alt tags associated with them so people can find what they’re looking for more easily. Creating descriptions in these images will also help improve their ranking on search engines such as Google Images! As will ensuring that they are properly named. If the image is attached to a post, name the image using one of your keywords from that post. Not just the alt text, the actual image – I see too many images with names that make no sense to the context. This plugin (Phoneix Media Rename can help you rename, titles and descriptions of any image quite easily.
Tip #20: Try To Stay Up with Trends – this means that we need to think ahead and find out what are going to be the most popular things online next year so that our business can benefit from them now rather than later It’s also important because many other sites may already mention these subjects by the time you’re thinking of incorporating them into your strategy.
Tip #21: Make sure not to duplicate your content. Be sure not to stuff keywords into content with no context around them as Google can see right through it and penalise you for doing so! This includes adding a keyword phrase in brackets every now and then which does nothing more than clutter up the page – it’s important to write naturally throughout each paragraph of text too.
Tip # 22: You should also always link internally within an article if at all possible by using words like ‘read more’ or linking directly back to another section of your article (this is called deep-linking). It gives people who are reading easy access to related information.
Tip #23: Include links to posts on other websites that are relevant, this can be done through sharing content or creating guest blog posts. This way when someone searches for a topic closely related to yours they’ll find your post first!
Tip #24: Add your URL to any images you post on other sites, this will help increase the traffic that comes from those sources.
Tip #25: “Add Social Media Sharing Buttons” – this means adding buttons on your blog post or article which allow people to share it with friends/family easily on different social media sites like facebook, twitter etc. With so many businesses being run online these days, more and more people want to be able to share content they find interesting rather than just clicking the ‘Like’ button.
Tip #26: Watch youtube tutorials on SEO. There are some amazing ones out there. A Nerds world does an amazing job.
Tip #27: Add images that relate to your content as google will rank these higher than text-only posts.
Tip # 28: Subscribe to groups that talk about SEO, Google will continue to change their algorithms and it’s hard to keep up – make sure you subscribe to the groups that talk about changes so they don’t drop out from your feed.
Tip #29: Add open in a new window to external links – you don’t want folks leaving your website to go somewhere else, if they open in a new window, there’s a chance they’ll return back to you.
There’s a lot more to SEO than the above, however, if you get these tips right or even just the first few of them right, you are on your way to learning about SEO.
I am not an expert in SEO but I have learnt some fundamental things along the way which may be useful. I hope these tips will give someone a good start on Search Engine Optimisation and they may even have found one or two things new which could prove useful enough to implement straight away. Check out my other blog posts here.
Best of luck!
Great SEO tips for every blogger.
Really helpful info and tips. Thank you!
Thanks for the sharing this information. I am newer to the blog community and trying to learn more about SEOs.
This is a fantastic list, some things I knew but many I didn’t…thank you I will be going through all my posts with this list…
Thanks Jeanine. I’m glad you found the list useful 🙂
Way cool! Some very valid points! I appreciate you writing
this article and the rest of the site is also really good.