“If you had one SEO tip, what would it be?”
There isn’t just one right answer with search marketing – but every SEO has their own idea of what the most fundamental search tactic is. A few SEOs from our head office were asked to share their most valuable SEO tips.
Ginny : “Optimise your title tags”
Title tags are one of the most important factors of optimising a site, not only for search engines but also for website visitors. Title tags are indexed by search engines and displayed as headings in SERPs so they need to provide essential information. Use relevant keywords in your title tags with the most important ones at the beginning to maximise your ranking potential – and remember the title tag is the first thing that Google sees.
Scott: “Make sure Google can crawl your site”
If Google can’t crawl your site, your web pages will not show up in relevant search results. There are many ways of increasing your crawl rate, including regular content updates, improving your site’s internal structure, link building, improving page load speed, optimising meta data and XML sitemap submission.
Paul: “Have a crawlable navigation”
Improving the navigational elements of your site can help to increase your visibility in search engines. Having an internal HTML sitemap and keeping your XML sitemap up to date are ways of helping Google’s spiders crawl your site, but the most effective way of making your navigation crawlable is to think about the site architecture. Sitemaps and canonical tags should be an addition – not a replacement – for natural crawlability.
James: “Write a good meta description”
Write unique meta descriptions for each page of your site and summarise the key points of your on-site content using key phrases that you are trying to rank for. Make sure that your meta description represents the content on your page.
Tom: “Do thorough keyword research”
Conducting thorough keyword research will help you establish keyword variants and you can weigh up the number of monthly searches against the level of competition on each phrase. Keyword conversion research can help you find the highest converting phrases to optimise.
Rich: “Add unique content to all key landing pages of the site”
Page differentiation is important if you want Google to index all the pages of your website. Without content, some pages can appear very similar to search engines - well written and informative on-page content will help to make each page unique.
Andy: “Generate an XML sitemap”
An XML sitemap is a file which lists all the URLs of your site. Sitemaps are there to inform search engines of any changes you make to your site including content updates and new pages. Submit your XML sitemap to notify Google if you want to aid the process.
Chris: “Make sure your SEO strategy and budget are in line with your business plan”
Before you start optimising, it’s important to establish a budget as search marketing requires an investment of both time and money.
Dave: “Get the structure of your site in order”
Your website’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. If you want Google to crawl your site easily, make the internal structure of your site easy to read. URLs with readable words are much easier to crawl and index than URLs with a long string of numbers or irrelevant characters. Using hyphens to separate words can help search engines understand the content and purpose of each page of your website.
Ian: “Write unique title tags for each page”
Going back to page differentiation, not only do you need unique content for each page but unique title tags are important too. The title tag of a web page is the first thing that Google will look at so it’s important that each page has its own unique purpose.
Tagged with :