Eight simple steps to better SEO

This article is not designed as a comprehensive guide to SEO, more a few steps you, or someone one your behalf, can perform on with relatively low effort. 

Reading this makes the assumption that you understand what SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is, and why you need it (to get more visitors to your website). You will probably know there are many things that Google analyses on your website - from the way it is built, it's speed, and content. There is no magic trick to SEO and I am dubious of companies that claim they can guarantee to get you to page one (they can't without paid advertising). Getting the fundamentals right to give you a fighting chance of being ahead of your competitors needs not be terribly complicated. SEO is an ongoing process which once the fundamentals are there, needs to be reviewed and adjustments made. 

Start with a comprehensive target key phrase list

By this, I mean phrases that you think your target audience will actually search for via Google or another search engine. Try not to think in marketing terms but what a human would type in. 'Integrated Business Technology Solutions' might sound like a catchy marketing phrase on a team building day...but no one is going to search for that, much more likely will be 'my computer is broken'. If you are going to do one thing with this list, decide the primary target key phrase (the one you think your clients will search for most) for each page and decide where best to implement that. Gone are the days are stuffing keywords into the pages and html...Google is better than that - it needs to be more subtle. If you can think of two or three more target key phrases, that's great, try to work that into the pages, too. The target phrases you might have on a specific service or product page may, and likely should, be very different to your 'home page or about page.

Is your website fast?

Google will penalise you for having a slow website. You may well think it runs perfectly fine, but you are probably viewing it on a decent internet connection. Test it at Google PageSpeed Insights: https://pagespeed.web.dev: 

At the time of writing Google PSI also gives indicators on Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO all of which can improve your ranking. It even gives some ideas of how to fix them - some may be easy to rectify, others may need considerable work - nip off the low hanging fruit for a start and test again. At the least, you can use the results from GPSI and approach your web developer and ask to work towards fixes. It's something you can go back to after changes and notice differences, measurably. Start with your home page, resolve the issues and then check all the other pages. 

Get a decent web host if your website isn't performing

It's common for websites to be bloated - WordPress an example where you have the core, theme, possibly a theme builder, and a whole ton of plugins slowing things down. We covered this in another article, and the more hardware you can throw at WordPress, the better. If your site is running on a shared server with limited resources and running slow and the budget permits, go to a decent host such as Kinsta (an example WordPress hosting specialist). Better is to have a website built in a way that it does not demand high resources in the first place - our website is on a basic server and runs ridiculously fast - the cost of such a site may be a higher outlay (hint: it's not WordPress) but long term with the lower hosting costs, it can pay for itself. 

If running WordPress or another CMS, consider a caching plugin such as WP rocket. We've seen massive improvements using this plugin. Do check everything works OK afterwards - you may need to exclude some pages from caching and adjust a few settings - but it will hopefully be worth it. Remember to clear the cache if you make any changes to the site or update plugins.

Take stock of the plugins you have installed - do you need them all? We've spruced up websites where there have been multiple, heavy plugins performing menial tasks which were negated with a few lines of code. Also think...do I really need this function? If not, disable that plugin and see if it helps the performance. 

Check your page headers

Think of page headers a bit like how you would write a document - you have the main title of the document (Header 1/H1), sub headers (Header 2/H2) and sub-sub headers (Header 3/H3) and on it goes. You must only have one H1 (this is the most important header). Depending on the structure of the page, you may have multiple H2s, and H3s sitting under those. Pages that have limited content may not warrant having H2/H3, and therefore may not rank very well, or perhaps they aren't the sort of page you don't need to be ranked (such as a terms and conditions page). You want these headers in a logical order not only for ease of the reader but because Google cares about this - organise it in the same way you would write a technical document; for example you would not randomly have a larger header under a sub-sub header. One common issue is that many themes (and developers!) use headers for decoration purposes for easiness but that often results in junk headers which can dilute the 'real' headers.

Why am I mentioning page headers in this SEO article? Because Google reads these headers and compares to search requests - so you can use this to your advantage. You may well use one or more of your target key phrases in your headers where appropriate, for example you may want the primary target key phrase included on your H1. But make the titles make sense, don't stuff them with target key phrases for the sake of it.

This is a handy place to check your headers. It may be that your web designer isn't aware of the issue and with a few tweaks, you can improve your SEO: https://www.seoreviewtools.com/html-headings-checker/

Check your meta title and meta description content and length

The page Title is different to H1 although often the text can legitimately be the same or similar - you can perhaps use a variation of your target phrases to 'catch' slightly different search queries. The page Title affects SEO as Google's algorithms use it to understand your content and rank your page. Google may well use it to display in search results for that page, like this, highlighted in red:

There is no defined limit to how long your page title and meta description should be...but keeping it within widely accepted parameters means Google is more likely to display it than decide 'nah, I'll pick something else to display in search results instead'. As a minimum, if the page title/meta description is too long, it will truncate the results...so you don't end up displaying to your viewer what you want them to see. Be careful and precise in what your write for the page title. 

The meta description can be a little more wordy. This is designed to entice your reader to click on the search result because it is relevant to them. It is this section:

While a good meta description may not improve your SEO, it can certainly improve the click through rate (CTR) which is what we're after. Use this link as an easy guide for the length and how it displays in search results - you can adjust it and see the preview. Then go back to your website, edit and save. 

Check that your images have alt attributes

In the scale of all things SEO, image alternative tags are low down on the list, but can be a simple thing to rectify, so worth doing. Think of an alt attribute (or alt tag) as describing what the image is, or what it is trying to convey, to a user that is visually impaired or if the browser cannot display the image. It's primary purpose is for accessibility, and that is your main priority for alt tags. Google will penalise your accessibility score for not having alt tags, but can also use them to match search results as a side effect of decent accessibility. 'IMG-320145b' isn't particularly useful to anyone with accessibility issues whereas 'a cute dog next to a Wi-Fi router', is. Could you target some phrases in here too? Maybe. But think of it as a practical exercise first, and SEO as a handy side effect. Some images are decorative only so don't need an alt tag...give it a blank one.  

This site is handy: https://www.seoptimer.com/alt-tag-checker/

Get more relevant backlinks

Backlinks are websites that link back to your page, another thing Google analyses towards your SEO profile. If you can get websites to point back to your pages, that's great, but it's not the case of the more the merrier. For example a business directory page, with many other links on that page, will not carry as much weight as a page that has your link as one of only a few links on the page. Even better is your link is within relevant content. Sometimes the content will be so good on your website that people will organically link back, and that is zero effort on your behalf. If you aren't that lucky, perhaps you will need to get creative in ways to encourage people to back link to you. This is quite handy for checking backlinks although like most, the results are limited unless you pay: https://www.seoreviewtools.com/valuable-backlinks-checker/

Make sure your pages are indexed

If your pages aren't indexed (trawled and added by Googlebot), Google isn't going to show them in search results. Your site should have a sitemap(s) (a file on your web host which lists your pages) which Google normally finds automatically but you can submit a sitemap if it doesn't. But having a sitemap does not guarantee all pages will be indexed for a number of reasons. A common example is where Google has trawled a page, knows it exists, but has decided not to index it anymore, possibly due to a page being stagnant for a while. In that case, you could think of ways to spruce up the wording to that page, perhaps expand on a few points (or take out unrequired fluff), update pictures, check the on-page SEO, tighten up the grammar or perhaps the information is outdated and could do with a complete re-write. Give changing the content a go, and then re-submit for indexing - you may get lucky and Google decides it will index it until it decides your page is boring again. 

Another common problem is when a page existed at some point but has been removed/renamed and so when that old link is visited, it returns a 404 error. My understanding is that it does not *directly* affect SEO, but it's a pretty bad experience for a user to click on something and get no-where (especially if they do close your website, therefore dropping your page credibility). But also if you have that page backlinked, you will lose out on that. It is an unwise move when you no longer need a page, or it gets recreated with a new URL, to simply delete it. You should either create the new page with the same URL, or create a redirect to the new URL. We have seen on occasion where a new website has been created and all but the home page is a different URL which unsurprisingly resulted in a massive drop in traffic and effectively starting SEO from scratch with no prior reputation. If you are looking to build a new website, make sure you, or your web designer, keeps (or creates a redirect for) all the existing URLs.

Without having a tool to know what pages are indexed or not, you are in the dark. If you aren't already, sign up to Google Search Console as not only does it have the page indexing information, but a whole host of tools to track visitors. https://search.google.com/search-console/.

CONTENT IS KING!

Well written, relevant and unique content (text on your website) is by far the most important aspect for SEO and I cannot stress how much more important it is compared to fine tuning key phrases or pretty much anything else on this page. Our articles are the most popular pages on our website by a long way, drives some traffic to sales (and therefore we really should spend more time doing them). Look at your main pages for a start, and then consider are there other ways you could add more - articles, blog, case studies, things you are working on, product reviews, news and so on. Update your content regularly to keep them indexed.

If you know someone who is a superb wordsmith, or perhaps doesn't know they are yet but reads many books or articles, ask them to cast an eye on anything you put out there. I have 'a guy' who chooses to remain anonymous who has been a massively valuable resource over the years to ensure my articles are somewhat within the structures of the English language, convey the right tone and generally read well. My hat is over there, off to him, for supporting me. 

There's a balance to be had especially if the website primary purpose is revenue generation. Time is money, and if assigning that time to gain sales is more successful in other forms of marketing, you may decide against content writing entirely. But if something interesting springs to mind, why not jot down a few words and turn it into an article? Like I have tonight.