Maximise your SEO

Most people have now got their heads around the importance of SEO and content creation. But there are other ways to boost your Google rankings which go beyond keywords and many websites and businesses are missing out on web traffic because they’ve neglected just a few simple SEO techniques. Here’s our guide to help businesses just like yours boost their online reach. 

 

• Create a title tag – make sure a search engine can quickly and easily recognise what your pages are about. Sites with good SEO change their title tags to reflect new content creation and reach a wider audience. Remember to keep it relevant, however, as web traffic landing on an irrelevant page and quickly leaving will drop your site down Google’s ranks. Additionally, the title tag is what appears as the hyperlink in Google so make it appealing to readers as well as Google. Each page of your website should have its own title and description to help widen the scope of your SEO reach.  
• Change your meta description – much like the title tag, your meta description should tell Google and readers what people will find on your page. Displayed beneath the title tag, a meta description needs to be written for both Google and readers simultaneously if you want to really increase your web traffic through a high SEO ranking. It’s an art form, to be honest but practice makes perfect. 
• Describe images, videos and infographics – Google’s algorithms cannot read photographs, nor can they read videos. If you post a video on YouTube, for instance, Google has no way of knowing what is in that video and won’t rank it in the correct search results. And considering Google owns YouTube, this could result in a serious drop in web traffic and views. Always write a detailed description when posting to YouTube. When it comes to photographs or infographics, you need to add what is known as ‘alt text’ to your images which Google can read and understand for SEO purposes. A few words is all that is needed. 
• Clean URLs – make your URLs easy to read, simple and clean. This is not only more search engine friendly but also more user friendly. It is actually unclear quite how much this boosts your SEO when it comes to Google rankings but we can say that using clean URLs helps when other people are linking to your site. In this way your keywords are in the URL which should boost web traffic by proving relevance to readers and also Google’s algorithm (which does scan URLs for keywords).  
• Link internally and externally – using anchor texts (hyperlinks embedded in the main body of a text) will themselves be picked up by Google’s algorithm and help with link building from other sites. Consider it a ‘you scratch my back’ kind of arrangement. Submitting a blog post to be published on a well-known site in your industry will lead to a link back to your site and you can link your website to your post. This generates web traffic from two directions. You could also strive for excellent content creation which other sites will share in exchange for a link back to your own page. Everybody wins! 
• Use the data coming back – Google Analytics is there fore a reason, so use it! There’s no use spending money on varied content creation if only the blogs and videos are being well received and the others are not returning web traffic. Hone your site, your content and your SEO in response to where your clicks are coming from. Even more importantly, where the sales coming from. Find this out using data available from analytical sites such as Google, strengthen this aspect of your content creation and see your profits rise once more. 

As the web evolves and businesses develop, Google too changes their algorithms and it can be hard to keep up with the latest SEO techniques. But it is also incredibly important to do so and by ensuring you are consistently focusing not just on great content creation but also on getting that content found by Google, you are guaranteed to see a steady flow of web traffic.  

SEO