Improving your site’s SEO through constant and good content marketing is the key to success with search engines and potential customers. When it comes to content online there are certain easy things that everyone should be doing to make sure your content is as optimised as much as possible; here is the SEO to-do list.
- Right keywords
First things first, no matter how savvy your SEO tactics are, it all will be wasted unless you are using the keywords that work best for your specific site.
By using tools such as Google Analytic (Dashboard >Traffic Sources >Sources >All Traffic >Google/ Organic), find out which keywords visitors are searching on to arrive on your website in Google. Those keywords should be your priority from now on when writing your SEO content.
The Google Adwords external keywords tool is also extremely useful for researching keyword volumes. A good tip when searching in Adwords is to ensure that you select [Exact] when searching for results – this will give you a more accurate reading when it comes to keywords and volumes.
These are two good introductory tools that everyone should use – there are plenty of others available that content agencies such as us use, but these are a good starting point. A good bit of advice too is to remember that long tail keywords work better for smaller business as the competition is lower.
- Picture titles
Another easy and quick way of boosting your SEO with little effort is by naming your images and their Alt Tag according to your targeted keywords. While the Google spider does not crawl actual images, it does crawl the alt tag so if they have the right title, it will index your images relating them to your pushed keywords.
- Type smartly
Using bold, italics, bullets and numbering not only makes the reading process easier for your audience, it will also increase the chances of catching the Google spiders’ attention. Each of these text characteristics is registered with a different HTML code, and search engines give more relevance to keywords written in certain HTML ‘styles’ particularly those in headings tags.
- On-page optimisation
While off-site link building is effective, it also requires a big effort in terms of contacting bloggers and analysing particular blogs’ rank value. On-site optimisation, however, is also effective and can be easily done in every post you publish. By relating your pages to each other, search engines will be able to index your website and your website pages more effectively.
- Sitemap
Simple things such as including an XML sitemap in your website will raise your chances of being indexed by search engines. Remember that spiders index pages, not websites as a whole; this is why providing them a sitemap will help crawlers to read your site better so they don’t miss any page.
Obviously these are just the basics, but it is a good place to start with your SEO plans.
