How To Setup Your Website For SEO
Search Engine Optimisation is an ever evolving art. Its essential to setup your website correctly with the basic SEO techniques and then to continuously review and improve over time. Here are our tips for getting setup correctly for Basic SEO.
- Domain Name – Try to pick a domain name that is related to the product or service you are selling. Its not essential (think RyanAir.com and “cheap flights”) but it is one of 200 factors which does help.
- Search Friendly Content – Put some preparation into the copy that you are creating for the website. Be sure to include keywords related to your industry that you think people will search for. Write in a human friendly way and be sure to include some questions like “Where can I find X” or “Do you want know about Y” because that is the way people search. Keep the copy shorter and topic specific.
- Structure – Be sure to structure the content correctly with Heading, Sub Headings and Paragraphs (H1, H2 and P). Your web designer should show you how to do this initially but after that there is a recognised hierarchy under which data needs to be structured to be indexed correctly be search engines – especially now that voice search is so popular. Plan your navigation based around grouping relevant pages together eb Home, About Us, Products, Services, News and Contact Us. Linking the pages with menus and breadcrumbs will all help.
- Images – Never name your images generically eg image1, image2 etc as image filenames get indexed. Add image Alt Tags (the descriptive name of the image) used by people who are visually impaired. Optimize the images by reducing in size before you upload to the website as speed scores well with Google.
- Updates – Add new fresh content to your website regularly. As well as increasing the searchability of your website Google will reward you for literally putting the effort into writing new content. Be sure to add tags to any Blog posts that are relevant to the post rather than your website.
- Sharing – Remember to share out any new content on your Social Media Channels are you will increase your SEO score if you content is shared or distributed on other channels.
- Technical – There are a number of technical steps that are essential that any web design company should do (we do) as part of basic SEO like :-
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- Google Analytics – This a reporting tool outside of your website that lets you see really useful info like visits, clicks, downloads etc.
- Google Search Console – This is where your website is first submitted so Google becomes aware and indexes it for the first time. Can take 4 – 8 weeks to be fully indexed.
- Yoast – This is the leading free (and paid) automatic SEO plugin for your site which should be installed for you.
- SEO Checker – This is a tool that can be run against your website to see how it scores for SEO and any errors or improvements are displayed.
- Guide – Here is a really good SEO Starter Guide from Google – SEO Starter Guide: The Basics | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google Developers
- Speed – Your website score will be downgraded is you have a slow website. Be sure not to have too many plugins, images, orders, pop ups etc as these all slow down your website. You may be a on a shared hosting platform – we offer dedicated servers which are much faster.
8. Reviews – Its advisable to review website SEO performance by running a search about once per month to see how your site performs. You should also use Google Keyword Search Planner and Google Trends which will help to get an understanding of what people are actually searching for.
Search Engine Optimisation is defined as a series of techniques which are employed by a website owners to improve their websites ranking.
TIP – Its important to note that SEO optimisation is a task. It is ongoing and should be constantly under review to see how your website is performing. Its not the responsibility of your web designer unless you are specifically paying for this service as an extra. It is usually setup correctly once as part of Go-Live and then its up to the owner to follow the above SEO techniques or to employ an SEO specialist.
