How to improve website SEO

 

There are appears to be a regular question across poor ranking websites as to why they constantly fail to rank across search engines. In order to overcome the basic hurdle you need to take your website back to basics. Focus at the issue on hand which i know many of you will hate to admit, is just poor quality content. The other part is website design and how you go about converting those vistiors into customers. Now here are some really simple tips to improve your overall website SEO result.

 

Webpage Title

 

Your web page title is important in telling your audience what to expect on that page. Most search engines will truncate the result to 70 characters but don’t be too concerned if this runs up to about 150 characters. The most important thing is to remember the page title’s relevance to your site. Does it match the information you are going to talk about?

 

Webpage Meta Description

 

The Meta description of your web page will give a more detailed summary in the search engine result. Your audience can glance at in order to see if this page will answer what they are looking for. Keep in mind most search engines will truncate your description to about 160 characters. Again don’t be too concerned if your description runs into 250 – 300 characters.

 

When writing your description, perhaps write a summary that will be relevant to the page. Search engines will often score this by matching the wording used to the pages content.

 

Webpage Keywords

 

Keywords are critical to assist search engines in correctly displaying your website in the relevant searches. It is recommended that you keep your keywords under 25. Each keywords should be separated by a comma and in lowercase.

 

Try not to list searches that are way too broad and be specific in assisting how people may look for you. For example a website developer who builds websites should avoid terms like, websites or developers. A specific search would be website designer Sydney or website site developer Sydney.

 

Broader searches are extremely difficult for potential clients to find the results they are after. Think about it, when looking for a service most of us will just search, plumber Sydney or Sydney computer repairs. We tend to associate the service with a location in order to show a list of more relevant results.

 

Keyword usage

 

When using keywords it is essential that these appear within the content or body of your text. These are often scored on a density level. Keywords that don’t appear or appear to much will either be seen as not relevant or keyword dumping.  It is also important to ensure that your core keywords, generally your business name or service type appears in the title, the description, the keyword and your content. This will give you a high quality content score for those words.

 

For example, a title of a webpage might be; website designer Sydney – Welcome to Sydney web design.

Description: Looking for a website designer, our website design studio is located in Sydney and provide amazing quality websites.

Keywords: Sydney website design, Sydney website designer, quality website design

 

The webpage itself should generally reflect the description then a greater body of content discussing your topic or service in more detail. This will generally reflect good keyword usage. Although be careful not to over produce main keywords to many times. Think of alternative words that will broaden your potential search opportunity.

 

Using H1 and H2 heading tags within your web page

 

If you are a regular user of Microsoft word or similar you will notice you have a text option of Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 and so on. When you select a heading you will notice the size variation, boldness and often indentation. It stands out and breaks down the importance of the content within your document.

 

The same applies to your webpage, Heading 1 is the most important information you want the reader to know. Heading 2 will reflect a sub document or something relating to the first heading but not as important.

 

H Tags are essential in assisting search engines score the quality of the information on your website.

 

Remember: Search engines want to deliver, good quality information to the end user

 

Robots.txt file, do I need one?

 

Robot text files are not essential but will assist in directing search engines to document relevant directories and files within your website. They also work in telling search engine robots where not to go. Don’t rely on this as a security measure tho as robots can ignore this file, especially malware robots.

 

Create a website Sitemap

 

Sitemaps assist in documenting all the various pages within your website. Setup correctly you will be able to set the frequency that each specific page will be updated and the importance of each page. Sitemaps should be setup as an .xml file on your server. Using Google Webmaster tools will assist you in setting up the correct file type.

 

These are just some basic foundations to setting up a good webpage, with basic optimisation. There are many other elements that come with a good website design but overall with the support of good SEO foundations and good qality content you are on track for building a great website.