Blog/5 quick SEO wins for your website

13th May 2021

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is still a bit of a dark art. There are umpteen different recommendations for SEO strategies from almost as many sources that profess to know THE secret to higher search engine rankings.

The key is to know which to listen to and which to ignore – something that’s easier said than done with so many experts around, whose advice can make or break your business, and with an ever-evolving landscape.

Often, SEO strategies will involve lots of under-the-bonnet work that you’re most likely going to have to employ a web designer/developer to do, but there are lots of things you can do with a CMS login that will give your site a much better chance of appearing near the top of search engine results.

Here’s my list of things you can do that will give your website an instant boost, without having to get stuck into too much web design.

SEO tip 1. Update your website regularly with good quality, relevant ‘fresh’ content

Producing fresh, unique, relevant content isn’t always easy, but it can be very beneficial to your site, as Google uses ‘freshness’ as a ranking signal. A blog is a great way of doing this, because it gives you the opportunity to write about hot topics that affect your business or industry, and that potential clients might already be searching for. Write 300+ words per blog for extra kudos from Google.

SEO tip 2. Make sure your images are all optimised

Page size and page load times affect your ranking in a number of different ways. Research has shown that slow pages frustrate users, and frustrated users abandon websites. This in turn affects your ‘bounce rate’ – the number of visitors to your site that leave having viewed just one page, which again impacts your page ranking.

Lots of things can slow down your site, many of which are beyond your control, but one of the main reasons your content can slow your page load time is because your images are too large. If you take photos straight from your phone and publish them to your site without optimising them, you might find yourself with a combined page size of a few megabytes that takes 5 minutes to load, and that will turn visitors away in their droves.

SEO tip 3. Link to other websites with related content

Link building remains an important part of SEO despite the dark shadow cast by link harvesting that remains to this day. Linking to good quality, relevant articles helps your audience by giving them quick access to external resources, but it also encourages other sites to link back to you, as they will be able to track where their visitors came from, and you’re more likely to get links in return which will increase your traffic.

Search Engine tip 4. Write for human beings, not for robots

The old way of writing content for SEO was to ignore that actual people would be reading what you’d written and instead put together a collection of keywords that spiders/robots would scan, log and rank you based on how many you’d been able to cram into as short a space as possible.

These days it’s much more important to focus on writing for your audience as if they don’t like what they see they quickly be switched off, jump ship and take their money and their time elsewhere. And with so much SEO emphasis these days being put on how the user behaves on your site, that will be noted and ultimately count against you.

Search Engine tip 5. Make sure your title, keyword and slug are thoughtfully written

Your page’s invisible content is almost as – if not as important as – what you can actually see on your page. Take the time to write a meta description and a page title that are themselves unique but related to your content (and that your content is related to your business, obvs!)

It’s also important that your URL/page slug also contains keywords that are related to your content, and that it’s written in a succinct way and not too long or rambling. Use works in your file structure rather than gobbledegook as that will also help your SEO. You can also give each of your images alt tags and captions too, to add more good quality content.

So there you have it. My five top tips for getting some quick SEO wins for your website. There are many other areas to focus on for further improvements, 200 of which are detailed here on backlinko.com but hopefully if you nail the five above you’ll be well on the way to SEO success!