Simple SEO Tricks you can do yourself
If you find yourself having a bit of downtime between the festive parties and family functions over Christmas and new year, then why not try some of these simple SEO Tricks you can do yourself to boost your website rankings ready for the new year of business!
Boosting your own SEO doesn’t always have to cost money and with some simple tricks you can easily give your website a boost and increase it’s rankings in Google.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This means making your website as optimised as possible for when Google crawls your website.
When Google crawls your website, it is simply a script that visits your website and tries to interpret it the best way possible. These scripts are commonly known as spiders.
You can ensure the Google spiders receive the most optimum content and help them to understand your website and business by implementing some simple techniques.
Use Keywords in all the correct places.
This seems quite obvious, but it certainly can be overlooked. You probably add your keywords to your pages when you write your content, but it can actually matter where these keywords are placed.
So where to add the keywords?
If your business is all about Mobile Phone Repairs, then this will be your keywords: Mobile Phone Repairs
Page Title Tag
You will want to ensure your main page title includes the keywords Mobile Phone Repairs. For example:
Expert Mobile Phone Repairs in London
The Web Page URL
You will also want to ensure the page URL contains the Keywords also, for example:
https://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/mobile-phone-repairs-london
First Paragraph
You will also want to ensure you have the keywords in the first paragraph of text on your page. Preferably within the first 100 words in the paragraph, for example:
Visit our central store for fast and efficient Mobile Phone Repairs. We are based in the heart of London and repair all types of Mobile Phones…….
Keep users reading for longer
Keeping your customers on your site for longer without having the bounce away is a very important point. If your customers visit your website and a customer hits the back button quickly to leave your site, Google will down rank your website due to the content not seeming relatable for the customer who visited.
Ensuring users stay on your website for longer tells google your content is important and helps boost rankings.
So how do you keep users on your website for longer?
There are some simple tricks you can do to make life easier for the user visiting your website. Firstly no one wants to read long and endless paragraphs of text.
Instead of adding tons of paragraphs, add more bullet points, pointing out relevant areas of your service or business.
Add clear headings and sub-headings throughout the content. This makes it easier for users to find the area of content that interests them the most without making them work for it by reading endless text.
This simple technique can really help keep users on your website for longer, just by formatting your pages in a cleaner simpler way.
Delete Zombie Pages
What is a Zombie page? A zombie page on your website is a page that does not drive any traffic to your website. It is simply a dormant page. These kind of pages don’t help your website at all and by simply deleting these pages it can really boost your rankings.
When you first get a website it can be really tempting to tell the world your whole story, tell them every thing about your journey, but in terms of SEO and ranking, only pages that drive people to your website matter!
Google have stated themselves that they prefer a website with 1 strong page as opposed to many smaller pages.
So if you have any Zombie pages on your website that do nothing other than tell the world how amazing your cat may be, it’s probably time to delete those pages.
Update old pages and posts
Before undertaking the last point about the Zombie Pages, why not see if you can improve or enhance those pages to try to cover them into powerful driven pages that make people want to visit your website.
One important note to know is, you can update the title and the description of the page or post, but make sure you do not change the URL of the page. Keep the URL as it is, simply update the page titles and content.
The reason not to update the URL is because Google may see this is ‘Duplicate Content’ on your website when in fact it isn’t. As it sees the old URL and now the new URL (if you changed it) and both have similar content, so Google can see this is a duplicate page on 2 URLS.
Optimise Images
This is a very easy one to do, but a very important one.
Optimising images can have a massive positive affect to your website. If you have a webpage and your images take time to load, this can really slow your website down.
So how can you optimise images?
There are multiple ways you can do this depending on your website setup. If you use WordPress for example, there are numerous plugins that can optimise your images for you, simply click a button and the plugin will run through your images optimising each image for the web.
The Manual Way.
To optimise images manually is very easy also. IF for example you have images saved on your computer that you want to use on your website, perhaps you have taken these images with your mobile phone, but the sizes are huge!
There are excellent online image compressors that you simply upload your image to, the website optimises your image and you can download the newly optimised image.
The main site we personally use is called https://tinypng.com
Simply drag and drop your large images onto the screen, the page optimises them and shows you just how much you have saved in terms of size.
This is a great tool to use and we definitely recommend using this to optimise your images for the web. The great thing about using a tool like this is that you cannot even notice a difference in the quality of your image, it retains its sharpness whilst reducing its size.
Another useful tip for who using images on your website and this can be extremely beneficial is to ensure you add ‘Alt Tags’ to your images.
Alt Tags are there to give your image a description. This helps the Google Spiders understand what your image is and what it is about. This can really help boost your page simply by adding the Alt Tags as Google has a better understanding of both your content and your images and can try to place your page in front of more users.
If you have a WordPress website you can easily add Alt Tag descriptions right from your Media Section in your website admin area.
Simply click on any image and you will see the image details appear in the right hand column. In there you will see the Alt Tag box. Simply add your image description in here.
The great thing about adding Alt Tags is your images start to appear better in Google Image searches, which can also increase conversions back to your website!
So there you have it, 5 simple SEO Tricks you can do with little effort over the festive period to really give your website a boost!
If you find yourself needing that little extra boost then speak to us about our enhanced SEO packages available where we can provide in depth SEO solutions and PPC campaigns to really get your business out there.
Have a very merry Christmas!
