Are you a local business entering the world of search engines and search engine rankings? This can be a daunting task if you are unfamiliar with how to best optimise your website for websites such as Google.
If you want increased brand awareness and more conversions coming to your business, then SEO marketing is not something that you can let fall to the wayside.
Here with the help of The Evergreen Agency in Oxford, we are taking you through some of the SEO basics that you can implement in your website, if you want to carry out more advanced SEO techniques you might want to get in touch with Aaron and his team in Oxford direct.
Research Keywords
As you will probably already know, when you are searching for a product or service online, you will normally find that the search engine finishes off your question for you.
For this reason, it is important that you know exactly the phrasing that potential customers for your business are using as you can then place these keywords within your website for the search engine to pick up on the next time someone search for this.
Of course, there will be some that are obvious and should definitely be placed throughout your website, however, you can use another tool such as Google Keyword Search to find what exactly people are looking for in your area, see how competitive these terms are and how often people are searching for them.
Once this list has been created, you can then place them in the content naturally throughout the site. However, it is also equally as important not to overuse keywords as search engines will see this as being spam. We would recommend going for a keyword density of around 2%.
Great Content
Following on from the last point about keywords, it is also important that your copy is great and easy to read. Keywords should not be overused, and Google will read your text just as a human would. This means it is extremely important that your website copy is well-written and readable.
A common mistake here is to overuse keywords in your copy thinking that this will let Google know exactly what your website offers, however, this makes it appears your website copy is poorly written and search engines will reflect this when ranking your website as they will think this contributes to a bad user experience.
Therefore, it is also important to seek the help of professionals as they will know how to improve your website ranking with good copy and not hurt it. Before publishing any new pages, make sure that you have proof read it to ensure search engines have no reason to place you further down their rankings.
Add Title Tags
The title tag is the link that you can click on in your web browser tab and each individual page should be unique as they all carry a lot of weight. They will also need to contain the relevant keywords to that page and there should eb a consistent format across the website. Separate keywords from your brand name using a hyphen or vertical bar and ensure that the copy does not exceed 55 characters as it will become too long to display.
Add Heading Tags
Heading tags are extremely important and they range from H1 to H6. Search engines place the most importance on H1 headings and this should be your page headline. Make sure you don’t use this heading tag more than once on a page as search engines will see this as a penalty. However, the other title tags from H2 to H6 can be used multiple times, for example, in any subheadings. Search engine ranking like heading tags and rank them highly as they increase the user experience by breaking up text o your page.
URL Structure
Another way to highlight your keywords to a search engine is through your URL. Keywords should be included after the domain name or after the ‘/’. When doing this, you should use hyphens to separate the words and use all lowercase letters.
Images
As search engines cannot see images, they need to use the coding on the image to understand what it is showing. Ensure there is a brief explanation of the image in the alt tag text, the image title should be a caption of the image and ensure that the image is saved as something descriptive and not just ‘image5432.’
Add Meta Descriptions
On search engines, you will see two lines of text under websites and this is known as the meta description. When you don’t provide this information, random text from your website will appear instead and this probably won’t make any sense to the user. While they won’t help increase your search engine rankings, they will encourage potential customers to visit your website.
