In challenging economical times we can’t all afford to pay for a full SEO audit of our website or even have the time to do it ourselves (assuming we have the knowledge). However, this should not stop your business website from being a well oiled SEO machine. As a creative agency in the heart of Southampton, we are amazed at the extent of SEO factors that can impact on your rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. The following are what we consider 5 SEO must do’s, and here’s the best bit…they wont take long to do and you wont need to hire a search engine optimisation specialist.
1. Keywords in Title Tag
We can’t stress how important it is to create a relevant <title> tag as this helps all search engines in determining what is in the content of a specific web page. Just ensure your title tag is short (7 words max) and your keyword is near the beginning, placing top-performing keywords in descending order of importance. It’s important not to just stuff the title tag with keywords, it should read naturally as the <title> tag’s contents are the source for the blue-link text shown in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Keywords density in text
Keyword density can be an SEO balancing act as whilst you need to ensure you write your content for readers, you also need to ensure your are hitting all your SEO keyword targets. You should aim for 3-7% keyword coverage in your text. Warning !!! 10% or more coverage will look suspicious and will no doubt be hard to read and seem forced. A handy analysis tool for this can be found at https://smallseotools.com/keyword-density-checker where you can check your word frequency within your text.
3. Anchor text of incoming Links
This is one of the most important SEO tips, as many websites fail to capitalize on the organic traffic they could potentially get. For example, If you have a website called southamptonwebdesign.com, then the simplest way and most common way people will link to your website is like this: southamptonwebdesign.com. If the website is about web design, ideal anchor text would be something like this: Web Design in Southampton. Now that link suggests to the search engines that the website linked to is about web design in Southampton. Over time as the number of links increase, hopefully the keyword “web design” is included in many of them and so you start to rank highly in the search engines for the search term “web design”.
4. Keywords in H1, H2, H3 tags
For your website to achieve its SEO potential, it is important to place page specific keywords within Heading tags. Heading tags are part of the HTML coding for a Web page. Headings are defined with H1 to H6 tags. The H1 tag defines the most important heading on the page, whereas H6 indicates the lowest-level heading. Choosing the right keywords to optimize for is the first and most crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. Search engines pay special attention to the words in your headings because they expect headings to include clues to the page’s main topics. You must ensure your keywords are relevant to the page topic and not just included to boost your SEO rankings.
Optimising for popular one-two word keywords is very difficult, it’s best to think first about what keywords users would commonly use to search and then to focus on less competitive highly specific keywords. If you are having trouble identifying keywords for your pages then use the adwords keyword suggestion tool or wordtracker to help you.
5. Unique Content
No doubt you have read numerous times that ‘content is king’ in relation to web design and there is good reason for that…because its true. Ensuring your pages content is unique from other sites will give your website a huge SEO boost. In addition, you should also look to significantly update your website content on a regular basis, examples of this range from blog pages with new posts to social media sites. This is important as search engines rank individual pages not whole sites.
Need help with improving your business website SEO performance?
If so, contact the team at Hijack Creative to discover how we can help your business.