How to Improve Your Website’s SEO

Without good SEO, even the best websites won’t get the visitors needed to succeed. With that in mind, here are some of the best ways to improve your website’s SEO:

Choose the right URL

Your website’s URL is the identifier that people will type into their web browser to access your site, and it’s one of the first things people notice when they come to your site, much like a storefront’s big sign. This is why Google looks there first when trying to determine your site’s topic and rank. Your preferred domain name should consist of both your company’s name and one or two keywords associated with your line of work. This makes it easier for both search engines and visitors to understand what it is you do and how you can help them. 

The same holds true for your site’s URLs. Make sure that the URL you use for a particular page (whether it’s a blog post or a product page) accurately reflects the page’s content and the keyword/keywords you’d like to see the page ranked for in the Google search results.

Refresh your content 

Keep your content updated and refreshed. The more often you can update it, the more the algorithms will be able to detect that it is current, and that will give you priority over other sites when it comes to results pages and how you rank on them. 

If you only use your site to give people contact information and you want to rank for SEO, the best thing you can do is blog regularly. The blog should be updated at least once a month, but once a week or even more frequently than that is better. 

Having a regularly contributed-to blog is one of the best ways to keep your content fresh and rank better in search engine results. 

If you find it hard to keep your blog updated, find professional help from a freelance writer. They will be able to write blogs on your behalf and potentially even do keyword research for you. In this way, you can be sure your site is always up to date and that the content is relevant to what people are searching for online. 

Make link building a priority 

Another way to improve your search rankings through SEO is to use both internal and external links. The great thing about having these links on your site is that search engines crawl through them and use them to find additional pages, which can then be indexed more easily. In addition to giving your customers more related information via internal links, you’re boosting your own site at the same time. 

Are external links helpful? If you link to high authority sites, this will improve your own reputation in the eyes of search engines. It shows that your content must also be important if you are linking to sites that are legitimate and relelant to visitors. 

Check those links periodically to ensure they aren’t broken. There are apps and websites that will check all your links for you, saving you plenty of time. You’ll just have to remove them or change them for something else once you’re aware of them. 

Create unique descriptions for each page 

Each page on your site should have its own title and description. These are concise descriptions of your company’s services or products. Make sure they include some relevant keywords and phrases, as this will always make them easier to find and improve search engine rankings. 

When you put your mouse cursor over a tab, what happens? That brief phrase that appears when you roll over the mouse is the page’s title. While visitors won’t necessarily see it, a well-written description helps search engines understand your site’s focus and the content of your individual pages.

Produce high-quality, helpful content 

You might think you can just write anything and place it on your website. The problem is that although that might have worked in the past, these days, search engines are sophisticated enough to know the difference between high-quality and useful content and content that is just there to fill space and fulfill some of the SEO criteria. 

There are some questions you need to ask to ensure your site offers high-quality content, and these questions come from Google itself. To begin with, does the post have a focus? Will anyone reading it be satisfied with the information they get? Will visitors learn something from your site? Does the content on your site show you have expertise and knowledge in your sector? Does the post have a target audience? Was it written to provide information to visitors and not just for SEO reasons? 

If you can make sure every piece of content on your site answers these questions in a positive way, you can be much more sure that you are doing things right when it comes to producing high quality content that will work for your SEO needs. 

Use anchor text

Make use of anchor text whenever possible while you compose the material for your website. When a visitor clicks on a link, they can go to a specific page inside your website or to any website on the internet specified by the anchor text.

When designing a website, it’s important to utilize descriptive anchor language that effectively guides readers to the content they want. You could also put in some relevant keywords and phrases. 

Do keyword research 

No matter what you do to optimize a page for search engines, from the URL slug to the H1 to the meta title, you need to have a keyword or set of keywords in mind.

Choosing the right keyword is important, not just for how people see your brand and how visible it is, but also for ranking. When picking a keyword to focus on, one of the first things you’ll want to know is what the term means. What does Google think people want when they search with this keyword? What is the search intent?

You can learn the level of competition for a keyword by doing some research on it, and this is where it can be extremely useful to contact professionals to learn more about their SEO services and see how they could help you, rather than trying to do it all yourself. If the blogs already ranking there have been there for a while, have a high page count, and are associated with a well-known brand, then it’s likely that you’ll face stiff competition if you try to rank there. While it’s true that anything is possible in SEO, you shouldn’t waste time and resources attempting to rank for keywords in highly competitive search engine results pages. Choose something else that’s easier to rank in, and you’ll do much better. 

Some tools to consider:

• SEMRush
• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• DemandWell
• Moz