Guide to high quality information to improve your website

Our SEO tips guide below will help you improve your website’s visibility in Google. While all search tools, such as Yahoo and Bing, have their own methods for indexing pages, in general, if you follow these, you’ll be improving your findability for each one. That said, Google is by far the most used brower in the UK with about 84% of market share. It’s also the biggest for the rest of Europe. So making your starting point getting things right for Google is definitely your best SEO strategy. In addition to the recommendations below, we have two tools that will really help you get your website to rank higher: SEO Page Optimizer and Keyboost. We make them free to trial. Simply click on the links to try them for free.

SEO tips newsletter

You’ll find heaps of useful information here to get you started on how to push your website closer to the top of Google’s rankings. And, to help you stay on top of the frequent changes in Google’s algorithms, we also regularly provide useful and practical information through our newsletters. They’re free to receive and you can sign up here to receive their SEO advice. Each one will arrive in your inbox packed with practical advice. Sign up for your free newsletters now!.

Some healthy SEO guidance

1. Targeted strategy

Your website has to do two things. First, it has to be designed to do what you want it to do but second, it has to serve up to your customers what they need. So you need to get the following points clear in your mind:

1. What’s the purpose of your website? What do you want to achieve with it? And how does your website contribute to achieving your company goals?
2. Who exactly do you want to reach with your website? And what do you want your target group to do on the site? Sign up to your newsletter? Buy your products or services? Book an appointment?
3. What do your competitors do to achieve the same aims and how can you distinguish yourself from them?
4. How do you attract your customers? Which marketing tools will you use for this? Social media? Digital content marketing? Web marketing such as PPC? Organic SEO?

2. Secure hosting

Hosting is often offered very cheaply. Although it’s tempting to take the cheapest option, as with everything, you get what you pay for. Cheap hosting often means that you’ll be sharing the servers on which your website is running. If you have to share servers with other sites, there’s a chance that your website will become slow or even go offline. If that happens once, it’s not a disaster. But if it happens more often, both Google and your visitors will trust the site less. And that will impact the site’s traffic and position in the browser results. Remember too that sites with a faster page load speed are more likely to rank higher in the SERPs because page load speed is an important factor for Google. So make sure you’re clear about the reliability and speed of your web hosting provider before you sign up. We’d advise never going for the cheapest option.

3. Metrics tracking for user analyses

Your website may look good but who’s visiting it? It’s extremely important to dive into the analytics of your website. These will tell you:

1. The number of visitors to your site
2. Your most popular content
3. The sources that took them to your website (ie. organic search or social media or referrals etc)
4. The keywords people type in to find your site
5. The bounce rate. You need to know how long people stay on each of your pages.
6. Conversion rates (are visitors doing what you hope your CTAs (call-to-actions) will make them do? Are they making a purchase or subscribing to your newsletter?

Having a handle on this information will help you to further improve your website. We recommend working with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These are great resources, and best of all, they’re free.

4. Streamlined structure

Provide a clear structure that makes your website an easy and a pleasant experience to navigate. Follow the ‘three-click-rule’. Generally, a customer expects to be three clicks away from the information he’s looking for. With every click of the mouse, a segment of your audience will disengage. So your menu shouldn’t be too complex. It’s also helpful to provide breadcrumb paths. Breadcrumb links let visitors understand their location in relation to the entire site hierarchy. These little navigational pointers are best positioned at the top of your website page. In this way, a human visitor can easily check where he is on your site (just like Hansel found his way in the fairy tale by means of bread crumbs). Breadcrumb links give you an extra opportunity to use your keywords.

5. Pertinent keyword research

Once you have formulated the strategy, you can start building the site. Set out to provide the user with clear relevant information. This could be text or infographics or images or videos. But it all needs to be based on the right keywords. That's how Google determines what your site is about. How does it work? A web user looks for information on Google. He or she uses certain keywords to do this ie. ‘cheap MOT services near Godalming’ or ‘handmade kids’ birthday cakes in Brighton’. Google first of all analyzes which web pages use those specific words. Then Google assesses which page is most likely able to answer the query. Google delivers up these pages first in the browser results. So, if you want your webpage to attract the right customer, it’s crucial that you use the words that your (intended) visitors will use. To find out what they are, keyword research is required. To do this, you need to find the answers to the following questions:

1. What specific words does your target audience use to find for their information?
2. What information are they looking for?

Based on these questions you can determine the content to include on your site and the keywords you want to be found through. Your keyword research will help you:

1. Decide on the topics or products you want to be found for.
2. Judge which keywords people will use to find that information.
3. But don’t just use the words you think they will use. Ask staff and customers to complete your list. You might be surprised by the terms they use instead. They won’t necessarily be the same as yours.
4. Make use of Google's Keyword Planner. It gives you lots of useful information such as the search volume and the number of times per monththat your keywords get typed in.
5. Also look at the competition score for those keywords. The lower the competition, the better because the more likely you are to score better for them.
6. Finally, look at the number of results when you enter the keyword in Google.
7. Make a sensible choice based on this information and don’t choose too many keywords per page. Usually one or two words are enough to be found as long as you position them correctly (more on that below).

6. Original, non-duplicated content

Images and video are important to your visitors. They make the text on the website easier to understand, and therefore more readable. But beware: Google considers your content the most important thing because Google can 'read' text better than other forms of content. (This is why you should make sure you give your video and image content keyword-rich descriptions). Overall, you should provide unique and relevant information in the form of text. Use your keywords and keyword-related synonyms frequently and naturally. The best performing web page will use the keywords in:

1. the URL
2. the menu
3. the category pages
4. the tags
5. the breadcrumb paths
6. the page title, also called the title tag
7. the header(s) of the text
8. the text itself, which we also call body
9. the links to and from your website
10. the filename and alt-tag of the images
11. the meta-description. This description, if relevant enough according to Google, also appears in the browser results. A good meta-description ensures that people click through to your site.

In addition, ensure that your text has a clear call to action: that’s the response you want users to complete. Web users like to be led. If you don’t tell them what you expect from them, they will disengage – something Google sees as a sign of disinterest. If, on the other hand, you instruct your visitor to make a purchase or fill in a contact form, for example, they’ll stay on your site longer. Your visitor is satisfied then and Google sees that your site meets a need. It will reward this action with a higher position in the browser results. So to sum up, get your keywords right and focus on conversion-oriented content to get optimum findability with Google.

7. Safe and relevant linkbuilding

If you’ve followed the guidelines so far, you’ve already done a lot of work, but you’re not there yet. The highest performing web pages have both outgoing and incoming links. No successful site will work without this kind of interaction. The web is exactly that: interconnected. So do refer your visitors to other relevant content on the web: you’ll be actively helping them. And encourage other sites to refer to your own website. If your information is interesting enough to be linked to, Google will see each backlink as a vote of endorsement and will place your website higher in the search results. Building your link profile is called 'link building'. It’s all about ensuring that your website is present in a network of other websites that deal with the same subject. Remember too to integrate social media on the pages that are suitable for this. Social media is becoming increasingly important in search engine optimisation. For example, a review of your business on Google+ will automatically show up in the browser results. Ideally, you’ll include social share buttons so that people can share your page or your blog on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. So get yourself set up with a company page on your chosen platforms.

Two practical tools

If doing all this seems hugely demanding, check out our two smart tools that will do a lot of the work for you. A smart online tool to improve your content is SEO Page Optimizer To use it (it’s free!), all you need to do is to type in your webpage URL and your target keyword. This clever tool then assesses your content and assists you in re-writing your text. When you use this SEO tool, you get guided as to how to structure your content in such a way that Google can 'read' it properly. So while you focus on writing powerful content to convert your visitors, the tool instructs you on what you need to adjust to make your text easy to find in Google. It also delivers you related keywords. So you get support with the keyword research too. Try out the suggestions for free and experience for yourself how easy it is to use!

5 reasons to choose this SEO tool

1. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to write SEO effective web content.
2. You’ll receive an extensive report with SEO recommendations on how to better format your content.
3. You’ll get a list of related keywords. This allows you to improve your keyword research via a relevant list of synonyms, so you can be sure you’re not over-using the keyword (keyword stuffing is not well-seen by Google).
4. You see immediate results.
5. You get one free SEO analysis per day.

Click on this link to view our tool and try it out. Do you need more analyzes? You can easily order these online.

Keyboost

Keyboost is an online tool that boosts your backlink profile and makes you more visible in the browser. As we explained to you above, in addition to writing strong SEO content, it’s very important to secure links from other web pages. We call these types of links external links. The websites that link to you should be relevant to your visitors and in a similar niche. Better still, these links should come from websites of high authority: then your website is transferred some of this SEO link ‘juice’ and will be better ranked by Google. How does Keyboost work? Our SEO consultant team will study your website and its content and then will research dynamic link opportunities for you only on relevant sites that Google ranks as having a high trust value. The result is that you’ll see your web page improve in the SERPs within a matter of weeks. Keyboost gets better results for our clients than Google Adwords and costs far less. We also provide you a progress report within a few weeks so you can actually see the difference Keyboost is making. Of course, you can monitor this yourself from your Google Analytics account too. Would you like to trial Keyboost for free? Click this link to do it. You’ll soon see your page rank higher in Google.

Keep improving

Think you’re done now with your website or webshop? You’re not! The process is rather like the painting of the Forth Bridge. You have to keep at it. It is never finished. After you have processed your keywords, posted relevant content and built up a link profile, you have to continue to improve your website. You should keep on studying your website analytics and using Google's Keyword Planner (or another keyword research tool) again to see if fresh keywords have come up or if the volume or competition of yours has changed Are there words that score better than the words you use on your site? You can then use those words to create new content, either as new website pages or blog content, so that you can attract more visitors. A successful website hinges on two factors: studying your website analytics and studying your website keywords. Finally, don’t forget to also listen to your existing customers. Ask them what they think of your site. What information do they value and what are they missing? Which keywords do they search for if they want to find information? Your existing customers are a rich source of information to help you improve your site. When you have processed all the info, you can check your pages with SEO Page Optimizer. This tool indicates how many words, keywords and related keywords should be on a page in order to score well in Google.

Need help? Request a free website analysis and quote from us. Email us at info@seopageoptimizer.co.uk or call us at +44 3308 084797. We now have over 15 years of experience with website marketing, link building and web conversion. We’re happy to share this with you.

Request your free quote here.

Want to get in touch? Do you have questions about our services? Please contact us. We look forward to being able to help you. You can call us at +44 3308 084797 or e-mail: info@seopageoptimizer.co.uk

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