5 Simple SEO tips for beginners
If you want your website to be worth its salt, and benefit your business, people need to visit it. To be able to visit your website people need to be able to find it, easily. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a huge priority for business owners with websites, with SEO campaigns and advertising budgets running into the hundreds and thousands. In the ever-changing online world it is hard to pin down some hard and fast rules about the best ways to Optimise your website for Search Engines, but here are some simple tips that will work every time:
Types of SEO
There are 3 main types of SEO every website needs
- On-site SEO – the technical form of SEO which looks at general website performance which the search engines rate: load speed, user-friendly/mobile-friendly qualities, easy navigation, good internal linking, good URLs etc.
- On-page SEO – providing good quality content on each page, and using relevant keywords to draw the right audience to the right page.
- Off-site SEO – boosting the authority of your website by getting backlinks to your website from high-ranking websites.
Competitor Analysis
The goal of all SEO is to be seen on search engines as ranking highly and easy to find. The ultimate goal is to come first organically (not via paid advertising) thus ranking above your local competitors. Statistically, the top-ranking site sees 35% of all click-throughs. 65% of people will click one of the first 5 links displayed. How well your website is ranking is very telling of how busy and how trustworthy your website is. As they say – ‘busy makes busy’ as the more traffic a website sees, the higher and more securely it’s ranking position becomes established.
Use competitive analysis tools that give you accurate information about competitor sites such as their load speed time, the number of back-links they have, where its traffic is coming from and what keywords are used of their pages. Armed with accurate information like this you can set about your SEO strategy with a clear goal of what you want to achieve to be a strong competitor and what you need to do it.
Persevere
Sometimes when working SEO, the fruits of your labour, although incredibly valuable in the long-run are rarely immediate. Patience and perseverance are essential disciplines when it comes to SEO. If you add or change your keywords, don’t expect to see huge changes in 48 hours. It is critical that these methods are given enough time to really bed into the website and the search engine.
It can be a tricky beast to please because search engines like Google like to see current information, so ensure that the content on your pages is updated often because if it looks as though it is beginning to stagnate it will begin to lose position. However the same does not apply to keywords- which really need time to become recognised and populate into the search engine. Think of it as a good stew, don’t keep whipping out and changing ingredients before they really have time to settle and do the work.
Play Nice
Search Engines are very clear about the rules and expectations they have of website owners as can be seen in Webmaster Guidelines where you will find a list of things expected of a good website and a list of things which are not tolerated. These guidelines are not for the benefit of the website owners so much as the search engine users. The search engine’s priority is to ensure its users are getting what they are searching for, in the form of decent websites providing quality and current content. Google will not send its users to your website if it looks out-of-date, or likely to infect a users device with a virus.
Search Engines are not tolerant of website owners using tricks or dishonest methods to improve ranking. Failure to adhere to these regulations will result in manual action from Google, or position penalties on your website meaning your website could disappear altogether.
Choose The Right Team
Implementing all the necessary SEO methods to a website can be a huge task, and because of this many website owners will outsource the task to another company which is specifically set up to do all of the required competitor analysis. However as previously mentioned this can be risky, as some unscrupulous SEO companies will use unsavoury methods to rank a website well temporarily, often resulting in penalties down the line. To ensure the company you are choosing to work with keeping everything above board and protect the integrity of your website lookout for things such as a current portfolio of reputable websites they have worked with.
The other important party on your team is your website host. User-Experience is such an important part of ranking well, and for this to be achieved your website host must ensure you have rapid page load speed, without interruptions or downtime. They must also ensure that you have all appropriate safety measures in place eg: firewalls, SSL certificates and intrusion prevention so that search engines view your website as safe. For quality hosting contact www.365hosts.com.
SEO can be arduous but it is essential if you want to rank well and bring traffic to your website. It is a long learning curve requiring patience and sometimes trial and error, you cannot hope to achieve everything you wish to achieve overnight. By using the information here, you can set a foundation for a securely organically well ranked and well-trusted website in the future.
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If you have any questions regarding SEO, getting your website to rank well, how to optimise your website for search engines, or if you are on the right hosting package for you, please get in touch today www.365hosts.com.