Good old Google is a fountain of knowledge, not least with their essential Google SEO tips that everyone can benefit from.
Now is the time to make the most of your website. Show it off. Make the user experience a fulfilling one.
The thing is, many people still don’t know the power of SEO and if you want to get ahead, its time to sit up and take notice.
Search engine optimization can apply to all sites, small or large and from any industry. Thanks to Google’s Guide to SEO, here are a few Google inspried SEO tips of how you can boost your website’s profile and visibility in the search engines.
Google SEO Tips: Number 1 - Unique and Accurate Page Titles
Make your title tag original. It should include the topic of what that particular page covers and each page should, ideally, have unique title tags. Keep them brief but descriptive.
Google SEO Tips: Number 2 - A Chunky Meta Description
The Meta description gives the search engines a summary of what the page is about. Aim for a couple of sentences or a short paragraph but keep it concise. Google might like to use this content as a “snippet” of your web page, so make it good.
Google SEO Tips: Number 3 - Look at the URL Structure
If you want to make it easy for search engines to crawl your content, try creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on the site. Plus, it keeps it nice and organised for you. Make sure your URLs contain relevant words. There’s no point putting “shoes” in there if all you sell are”bags”.
Google SEO Tips: Number 4 - Easy Navigation
If you want people to find your information easily, make sure you look at the site navigation. If visitors can’t find the page they want they will be sure to leave. Create a natural flowing hierarchy for your pages and use mostly text – it makes it easier for the search engines to read.
Google SEO Tips: Number 5 - It’s all About the Quality of Your Content
We all like interesting things to read, so make sure your content is dynamic, relevant and interesting. Users know good content when they see it. Make your text easy to read and keep it organized. Think about your writing technique – even if you like using “big” words you might want to refrain from doing so for your user’s benefit. Keep your content fresh and unique.
Google SEO Tips: Number 6 - Anchor It
You know the clickable text that users see as the result of a link? The word you see is the anchor text. It’s designed to tell Google a little bit about the page that you’re linking to. The better the anchor text, the easier it is for users to navigate too. Make the text descriptive and concise.
Google SEO Tips: Number 7 - Head It Up
Heading tags present structure on the page to users. There’s 6 different sizes of heading tags, ranging from <h1> (the most important) to <h6> (the least important). So, if you’ve got a page with a news article on, you might want to put the name of your site in an <h1> tag and then put the topic of your article in an <h2> tag. Think of them as “outlines”, but use them sparingly.
Google SEO Tips: Number 8 - Optimize Your Images
Everyone likes pretty pictures to look at, but optimizing them is a different matter. Give them a distinct filename and add the “alt” attribute which allows you to specify alternative text for the image. Sometimes users view websites on browsers that don’t support images, so it’s nice to cater for these people too. Keep the text descriptive.
Google SEO Tips: Number 9 - Make use of robots.txt
This robots.txt file tells search engines whether they can access and crawl certain parts of your website. It’s a file that’s placed in the root directory of the site. Some people don’t want certain pages of their site crawled because they wouldn’t be useful if shown in the search engine’s results.
Google SEO Tips: Number 10 - Think about rel="nofollow"
Basically, this handy little bit of code allows you to tell the search engines not to pass your page’s reputation (PageRank) through to the pages you link to. This is useful if you have a comment facility on your website and you don’t want to be vouching for the links that people include when they leave comments.
Google SEO Tips: Number 11 - Promote Your Website Properly
Promoting your website is important. If you have new content, naturally you want people to know about it. Maybe set up a blog and let people instantly know that you’ve added a new product or suchlike. Look into social media sites and consider communicating with similar niche markets to yours.
Google SEO Tips: Number 12 - Free Webmaster Tools – Get Stuck In
There are free tools available for webmasters, so check out what the major search engines have to offer. Google’s webmaster tools are full of useful little extras that can help you improve your site. You can see which parts of your site the Googlebot had trouble crawling and then you know to do something about it. There’s loads of other features too – take a look!
And finally…Tip 13: Web Analytics – An Essential Addition
One you’ve got a really nice site up and running you’re probably going to turn your thoughts to traffic. How many people visit your site? What pages do they click on? Web Analytics programs like Google Analytics provide concise, detailed information that any website simply can’t afford to be without.
So, there you have it – a detailed breakdown of all the essentials for helping your site be the best it can be!
Need more SEO tips? Click here to talk to The WebMarketing Group today - or call 0845 555 5040
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