Optimising your website for organic search results can be a tricky and time consuming endeavour, but is certainly worthwhile for business seeking success online. The practice of helping your website be found in search results naturally is commonly known as “Search Engine Optimisation” or SEO for short, and involves a range of considerations. For the most part, good SEO starts with research, and an understanding of the basic principles of search engine optimisation. In this blog, we explore the top 5 ways to improve your website’s organic position in search engines.
It is imperative that a well thought out keyword strategy is created and implemented across all pages of the website from content pages, through to product specific landing pages.
Adding high value phrases and keywords to the pages on your website will help improve the organic position of the website. Updating individual page meta titles, descriptions, heading 1s and on page content with such phrases and terminology used by your target audience will help boost these pages organically and over time should be more favourable in the eyes of Google and ultimately acquire more customers.
Firstly, to optimise your images for the web, resize them down to a manageable size. Next, you should compress and optimise all images which can be done for free using such tools as Tiny PNG. Resizing, compressing and optimising Images will help your pages to load quicker for users. Search engines dislike slower loading websites.
It is important to ensure that your images have proper Alt attributes too. Google, for example, can’t actually see the images which you upload to your site, but Alt attributes help the search engine categorize your photos. Alt attributes should be a brief description of the image, but it should not be too long.
You can review and analyse your website's page speeds using tools such as Google’s Page Speeds Tool. This analyses the webpage, gives it a score based on page speeds and produces a list of recommendations and ways to improve the web page load speeds which usually include optimising images, eliminate render-blocking resources, serve static assets with an efficient cache policy and setting an explicit width and height on image elements to reduce layout shifts and improve CLS and more. Website speed is a recognised organic ranking factor in 2022. Search engines have confirmed that providing a fast, optimised and secure mobile website is one of the key factors they consider valuable when assessing which websites to showcase in their search results.
Internal linking helps to gain search engine authority. You want to link related articles to push visitors deeper into your site. Ideally, you want to link to anchor text, these are the words that site users click to move from one page to another. For example, let’s say that you have a page about Garden Tools on your website, and you want to link to it from a post about Garden Supplies, use the hypothetical “range of Garden Tools” anchor text for extra SEO points.
Internal links should be natural and be careful to not overdo it. A page of text that is nothing but links isn’t very readable, so search engines will dismiss it. It is also important that your links work. Broken links tell search engines that you’re ignoring proper site maintenance, so search engines will punish your site.
Another factor which Search Engines consider important in terms of ranking pages and websites is the relevancy and “freshness” of the website. Search engines do not appreciate old or stale websites that do not update or publish fresh and unique content. Of course, each new piece of unique content gives you more opportunities to rank for certain key search terms, include links and create ‘shareable’ content which may create back links and increase shares thus improving the organic authority and ranking of the webpage. By adding new content which triggers your website to be indexed, you are creating more opportunities to show up in search results, which may lead to increased traffic to your website. Blogs are a particularly good method used to achieve this goal.
The role which SEO plays in a website and a business’s performance and growth has rocketed significantly over the last few years.
Search engine optimisation can be a slow and technical endeavour , however the opportunities which it brings are vital to any type of business and are critical to a brands online presence now and in the future.
All of this helps connect your product or service with the right people in the right place at the right time who are looking for a solution such as the one you offer.
Confused or need help, Contact Dmac Media Today!