10 Simple Ways To Improve Your Website Rankings

Learning the basics of SEO is key if you want to improve your website rankings. Here are 10 simple ways to implement Search Engine Optimisation and learn basic SEO techniques in the process.

Content

1. Headers

Help to ensure your content is broken up into sections. Group ideas together and utilise H1/H2/H3+ header tags in their proper hierarchy to make content easier to find. See more in our article about easy optimisations you can make on your site.

2. SEO Plugin + Keywords

Use an SEO plugin to help keep you on track with your keywords. While it isn’t a replacement for keyword tools and professional SEO research and implementation, it is a great place to start. Ensure that you concentrate on a keyword or key phrase in each article, input a meta description for search engines to draw on, and ensure that your content answers a query for users.

3. Be Consistent

Consistency is key for SEO and rankings. Consistency of posting content, of working towards your SEO goals, and of quality is really important as it speaks to your authority on a subject. Badly written content, and a lack of content on your chosen fields / keywords, will impact negatively on your SEO.

4. Links are Liked

Make sure your related content is linked together – this ensures that your website visitors are able to find the information they may be looking for easily. This also signals to Google that you are a wealth of information and have lots of relevant information for your reader.

External links to relevant and high ranking are also beneficial.

Technical

5. Site Speed

Site speed is important because a good user experience for your potential clients is a must with websites. There are many optimisations you can do to improve your SEO, and this is number one! Use GTMetrix to check your site speed or Experte for checking pages in bulk – and if you need help, please contact us for a run down of our services.

6. Images

Have you loaded your images onto your site without optimisation? Are they weighing down your site and slowing everything down? There are plenty of pre-load optimisations you can do (reduce size, export as a jpg file, and compress), as well as plugins that offer compression and lazy loading features to help with this issue.

Don’t forget to add your ALT text information to your uploaded photos too!

7. URLs

Try to avoid lots of small connecting words in your URLs. Unless you are aiming for a specific key phrase (e.g. /elephants-in-the-wild/), you can keep the URLs nice and clean and short by dropping some of these extraneous words in the URL. For example, if your title is “25 Fun Road Trips To Take In The USA”, but your keyword phrase is “road trips USA”, then you can make your URL “/road-trips-usa/.

8. Mobile Responsiveness

Half the traffic coming through Google these days is via mobile devices, so it is critical that you ensure your website is mobile responsive. On top of that, do make sure that you pay attention to accessibility when designing your site.

For those users that have mobility issues, ensure elements are spaced out so links can be clicked cleanly. For those who have impairments to their sight, ensure the ALT text is filled in and accurately describes the photo.

9. Fix Broken Links + Errors

There’s nothing worse that browsing a website and finding that some of the links don’t lead anywhere or getting a 404 error. Keep your website up to date, ensure dead links are redirected to the new URL or homepage, and be sure to fix or validate any Google Search Console errors as soon as they appear!

eCommWeb can help: If you need site optimisation work or an SEO audit, please contact us for more information today!

Off Page SEO

9. Build Backlinks

There are plenty of things you can do off-site that help boost your SEO and website rankings. One of these is to build backlinks from authority sites back to your own. Low quality backlinks or no-follow links have no value, and backlinks from spammy sites can be detrimental, so choose wisely how you approach link building.

Some good ways to build links back to your website include:

Writing a guest post on a high authority site with a do-follow link back to your relevant blog post
Adding a submission to a collaboration post (write 1 paragraph for someone else and receive a backlink in return)
Join Quora and offer your relevant articles as answers for people
Network, engage and help out other businesses on social media – this often leads to collaborative opportunities

Do not use black-hat techniques to gain backlinks. Do not buy backlinks!

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