Posted 08.09.2016
By Lorna Burrows
Firstly, it’s important to understand search engine optimisation (SEO) has to be an ongoing process for it to remain effective. When we launch a website, it is always optimised for search engines like Google but without putting SEO into practice regularly, the website won’t stay as visible to its target audience as it should.
We offer search engine optimisation packages to all of our clients but for the ones that choose to give this a go by themselves, here are our tips;
Web content is the text, images, sounds and videos on a website. It is also, arguably, the most important consideration when practising good SEO. Google loves fresh, well-written and unique content and is likely to boost your search rankings if it recognises that you have this on your website. Having a blog on your website which is updated frequently is a great way of doing this.
So far, content may seem fairly straightforward if you aren’t that “tech-savvy” but have strong writing skills. However, it is also important to produce landing pages for your great content. A landing page on a website is a page that a customer will “land on”, i.e. the first page they arrive at on your website.
To SEO professionals, it is a web page that has been designed to achieve an objective. These pages are created and optimised so that they rank in Google searches for specific chosen keywords. When writing content for these pages, be sure to focus on your primary keyword or phrase.
Get in touch with us to find out more about the advantages of landing pages and how we can help you set these up.
In all your content writing, you should be using internal links. An internal link is a word or phrase in text that, when clicked, takes you to another page on that same website that relates to the linked text.
Internal links are great for SEO purposes and also user experience. They help customers navigate your website and find the information they are looking for easily. Google recognises this and so it gives you points for using them.
Keep an eye on the news for anything you can blog about which relates to your industry/sector. Google will give your website more authority if it sees you are keeping your content fresh and relevant and talking about subjects that large amounts of people are searching for information for at that time.
It’s good practice to include outlinks in these blogs. Link out to the websites you sourced your information from (these should only be authoritative, trusted websites). Including sources in your blogs adds credibility to your writing and improves the SEO on the page.
As with many SEO techniques, it isn’t always clear exactly how using social media improves search rankings directly but there are certainly some obvious benefits!
Ignoring SEO for a second, linking to your website content on social media is always going to have a good impact on website traffic. So regardless of SEO, this is something that should be included in your social media strategy.
Coming back to SEO, linking to your website content in social media posts will allow your content to reach a wider audience which will increase the chance of gaining backlinks. Backlinks are links on other websites that link to your website.
It is still not clear whether Google takes into consideration how often a link is shared on social media but Bing has confirmed this is a ranking factor: “We take into consideration how often a link has been tweeted or retweeted, as well as the authority of the Twitter users that shared the link.”
Even if it is the case that using social media doesn’t directly impact your website’s ranking, we do know that social media profiles appear in search engine results.
It is thought by SEO professionals that the bigger the presence your brand has on social media, the more credibility Google gives to your website. This is because large brands always have a large social media presence therefore you can make your brand seem bigger than it is by being more active online.
http://moz.com/blog/10-super-easy-seo-copywriting-tips-for-link-building
http://www.seoinc.com/seo-blog/five-tips-for-writing-great-seo-content/
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