Every business with a website should make search engine optimisation a priority and part of their growth strategy. As search engine optimisation is often an overwhelming topic to consider when it comes to your website, we have put together a few quick tips to help you improve your search engine ranking.
What is search engine optimisation?
Search engine optimisation or SEO refers to the process of improving the position that your website appears at in the organic search results returned by sites such as Google. As a general rule of thumb, sites that appear higher up in the results will get more traffic to their pages, and so potentially more business. It is therefore important to make sure that your website is performing well and there is a lot you can do to improve your search engine ranking which doesn’t need any expert knowledge.
Use Google's keyword planner
This tool is great for generating ideas on keywords and phrases to use within your content in order to boost your SEO. It is a free-to-use tool which allows you to see which key phrases are attracting the most searches. It is also worth putting in your competitors website address to find new phrases to consider writing about.
Think content
Your content needs to be fresh, relevant and crucially updated regularly. The content you produce, whether it is a blog, a news article or a hints and tips page is the best way to make your site relevant to the terms people are searching for and to give people a reason to visit your site.
Be careful in the way you use keywords in your content - Google will spot ‘keyword stuffing’ easily. Instead use one or two keywords and phrases to target and use them naturally within your content.
Make sure you set up your URLs with search-engine-friendly wording. For example, the search engines would struggle to understand that this page is your news page:
www.beautytherapy.co.uk/new_051114/admin
Instead rename your page:
www.beautytherapy.co.uk/news
Set up pages on social sites
Social media is a great way for you to communicate with your clients but it is also great for building your online presence and it is well worth experimenting to find the sites that work best for your business. Set up profiles making sure that your content is accurate and relevant and your web address is shown.
Don't trust agencies that promise guranteed results
We all get the emails which guarantee that their method of search engine optimisation is the best and will get you to the top of the organic search. There are no easy shortcuts. A good SEO agency will be able to help you rank as highly as you can, however it simply isn’t possible to guarantee page one rankings.
