Improve your SEO in an hour

Post updated 7th December 2022.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of improving the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results (not paid for).

Before trying to improve your SEO, you need to first understand it. The quality of your traffic is important - there's no point having loads of traffic if they aren't going to become a valued client or customer. Once the quality is right, focus on the quantity, the number of people finding you.

Without getting too technical, search engines use crawlers that gather information and content from the internet which they use to build an index. An algorithm is then used on this index which matches a users query to the information and content and displays this to the user.

"93% of online experiences begin with a search engine" (1) therefore it's important search engines know what you're about and who you're looking to find! There are a number of ways to improve your SEO and they don't take long to achieve.

1.High Quality Content: there's no point gaining new visitors to your site if they don't like what they see when they arrive. The content you produce must be high quality and worth reading. Your goal should be to keep visitors on your site for as long as possible.

2.Your Images also play a part in SEO - make sure they're the correct size to start with (large files can slow down loading time) and then make sure they're named correctly (IMG407 will have no impact but '18ct Diamond Engagement Ring' might!).

3.Blogging is a fantastic way of gaining new visitors, especially if you keep your content relevant to your ideal client. Blog posts are a great way of keeping visitors on your site for longer too, which will improve your SEO score (always worth adding a summary of other related blog posts at the end as well, as an added way of keeping the user on your site for longer!)

4.One thing that can have a negative impact on your SEO is broken links so go through your site and check for these and correct them asap! A fantastic tool you can use for free is Dead Link Cheker which will do all the work for you!

5.Encourage your readers to share your content on social media. The more times your content is shared, the better it is for your SEO.

6.Perhaps the most well known aspect of SEO, keywords! This is a major factor in SEO but should be done naturally; fit keywords into your content, titles and image titles. When keywords match a users search you have a better chance at appearing higher in search results.

7.Generate links from other sites to yours. Get people to reference your content, get interviewed...get your name out there! The more links to your site the better.

8.Whilst we’re on the topic of ‘links’ - ensure links to external sites open in a new window (remember we want to keep users on our site, don’t give them an opportunity to skip over yours and go to another, get them to come back once they’re done!)

9.If you sell products or services in a localised area, Google Business Profile is a great way to improve your SEO. By completing your Google Business Profile with information about your business (contact info, address, opening hours etc.) you have opportunity to show up in searches like Google Maps.

10.Out with the old - make sure you disable duplicate or unused pages!

11.Clean and proper URLS - when creating new content, if your URLS are auto generated they can be a complete mess (www.katiehamling.com/blog/22/02/22/asd;fkjd;slfkj doesn’t exactly have a ring to it does it?) Make sure to change the URLs to something clean and short. URLs should be intentional.

12.Add SEO titles and descriptions - Summarise each page, let people (and Google) know what they can expect to find there.

13. Register your site - let Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools know you exist!

14. Analyse - set up Google Analytics as soon as you set your site live! Using analytics can let you know where you should be paying attention to within your site and it’s FREE!

15. Alt text for images - this is a description of each image which instantly improves accessibility within your site. Customers who are visually impaired may rely on alt-tex to tell them what an image is showing. Search engines also use alt text to understand what your images contain.

16.Update your site regularly. "If you do a Google search for just about any term, you'll quickly notice the top results are usually published in the past year or so" so going through your site and updating any old content is well worth doing!

References

1. Pat Ahern, 25 mind-bottling SEO stats for 2019(and beyond), June 5th, 2019

2. Neil Patel, How updating your old content can help with your rankings