Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, is a long-term game. You need a solid strategy, the willingness to execute and above all, patience. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t simple and quick ways to help it along the way.
The first step in boosting your website ranking is getting users to stay on your website and interact with your content. The following tips will help you improve the overall user experience and usability of your website, thus giving you a SEO boost.
1. Header tags
Implementing header tags into your website content not only improves the formatting by breaking it up into sections, it also improves the user experience of your website by making it easier to read. Because nobody likes running into a giant wall of text!
When readers are more willing to spend time to read your content and come back for more, search engines will view your website with more relevancy, thus improving your ranking. Search engines also rate keywords in header tags more heavily. By including relevant terms in your header tags, you are also boosting your SEO ranking against those keywords.
2. Image optimisation
There are multiple ways that your images impact your websites SEO, including image file format and sizing. You can also indicate the relevancy of your content to search engines by using keywords for your image file name, alt tag, title, description and caption.
3. Contact page
Including a Contact page on your website and putting the link in the navigation not only makes for good user experience (especially if you have an ecommerce site) but can also potentially improve your SEO. Contact pages can also help generate new business opportunities, capture new leads, improve customer service, and more.
4. Mobile optimisation
In April 2015, Google started to penalise websites that are not optimised for mobile by bumping down their search engine ranking.
Now, it’s no secret that more users are consuming content on mobile devices. Therefore, if your website is not fully mobile optimised, it’s not just your SEO that will be affected, your user experience and conversion rates could also drop.
5. Social sharing
The number of Facebook shares, Tweets, Pinterest pins and other social media mentions can influence SEO rank. Installing social sharing buttons on your website not only makes it easy for users to share your content, and thereby improve user experience, it can also help you rank higher on searches.
6. Readability
Even the most well-educated audiences can be put off your website if they find your content difficult to digest. Making your content easy to read and follow helps make it useful to your readers and increases the chances of them returning to your website. Also, some experts believe that Google takes readability into account when ranking webpages.
All these tactics have the potential to boost your rankings in the search engines, but don’t expect your rankings to jump overnight. If you would like some advice on your websites SEO, feel free to contact me. I’d be more than happy to help you!