Basic SEO (Part 1): Best Practices

Give me an S… Give me an E… Give me an O… Three powerful letters that can help you increase traffic to your website.

So what is SEO, exactly?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Simply put, it is a set of techniques that allow websites to rank on the top of the major search engines’ organic (unpaid) results.

In other words, SEO is all about finding ways to increase your site’s appearance in search results.

Imagine that this is your new business card…

With over 93% of people using search engines as their first point of research, it goes without saying that search engine optimisation is important for any website.

There is no secret to automatically rank #1 on Google, but following the SEO best practices outlined in this post will make your website or blog definitely more search engine friendly.

Without getting too technical, here is what we do at mOOnshot digital to set your SEO foundation right. We will look at 2 major aspects of SEO, On-site SEO and Off-site SEO. We’ll cover both in this blog series divided in two parts.

On-site SEO

On-site optimisation covers what can be done on the pages of the website itself.
So let’s explore the best tactics to establish that perfect site structure…

Strategic Keywords Use

When it comes to optimising your website for search engines, defining the best keywords for your brand is critical. Think about your keywords as search terms: how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it?
You should then place appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: titles, content, URLs, and image names.

BEWARE: filling your site with ridiculous amounts of random keywords (usually referred to as
“keyword-stuffing” in IT jargon) can actually have negative effect on your ranking. As a rule of thumb, you can include popular search terms/phrases within your post/article, as long as it flows with your content and does not read like a bunch of random keywords or search terms.

Fresh Unique Content

It may sound fairly simple and straightforward, but it is actually often the most difficult to execute: create fresh and unique content that users will find useful and want to share.
Sites with dynamic content often rank higher than those with static content. So update your site regularly with new content by integrating, for example, a blog section.

Create Accurate Page Titles

Page titles are one of the most important elements of your webpage and they heavily influence the search engine results. The better the title tag can describe the page’s content, the more likely someone will choose to visit your site. Create unique title tags for each page and use brief, but descriptive titles.
When creating a new page, think about what you would search for in Google if you were looking for an article about that same topic. Your post titles plays a very important role in SEO. Not only does it appear on the actual post page, but also in the browser title bar.

Link Past Posts

Integrating internal links into your site is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages. Links are like doorways to more content. Search engines find websites by traveling from link to link. Whenever you have a link on a page, a search engine will crawl through it and that’s precisely what you want: search engines seamlessly crawling your site… and often! Make it standard to link back to your past posts regularly when creating new content and make the anchor text search-engine-friendly.

Describe Images Properly

Search engines still have difficulty discerning what an image is about. Make sure you use “ALT” tags when you add images so search engines can understand what they are about. Adding an “ALT” tag allows you to specify a description for every image on your site. By doing this, each image you upload with yield some SEO benefit.

Search-friendly URLs

Permalinks should include your keywords so that both your visitors and search engines can identify what your post is about. Make your URLs more search engine friendly by naming them with clear keywords.
So instead of having a page’s URL be this: http://yoursite.com/?p=01
It should look more like this: http://yoursite.com/nicepage/
Although you can adjust the format later, it’s time consuming to reformat existing links and very frustrating for your visitors to reach a dead link. Not only will you miss out on potential traffic and users, your site may be penalized by the search engines if you have too many broken links.

Loading Speed

Page loading speed is an important SEO ranking signal, so remove any non-essentials that slow down your website, such as music players, large images, flash graphics, and unnecessary plugins. Google recently launched an excellent tool to help you identify elements of your site that slow down your loading time, check the Google Page Speed tool.

Last but not least…

Track, monitor, review, and improve. Again, again, and again! Google Analytics is a free an easy solution to do that. You won’t know if your SEO efforts are working unless you keep an eye on your page rank, track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they’re using to find your site. Remember, SEO is an ongoing process.

There you have it, the most essential tips to improve your SEO on-site. We will post the second part of this series soon with best practices to improve your SEO off-site. Stay tuned on our mOOnshot digital blog!

Tags:

Audience DevelopmentGoogleOn-siteSEOTraffic