Although some of the discussed tips will seem very self explanatory, they are in fact some of the core concepts behind ranking your site or atleast get it moving in the right direction. If you are looking for more information and want to speak to an SEO expert, get in touch today.
1- Choose a service and stick with it
Of course, your website can be about more than one the services you provide, but focus your homepage on your primary service as this will be naturally and most often be your most authoritative page.
This is vital to your determining your future site performance so conduct the necessary keyword research before selecting your target service. Factors such as search volume, competition, profitability should all be considered.
2- Keywords need attention
Keywords are going to be imperative moving forwards and optimizing your site with these in mind will be and should be a primary focus of yours. Page titles, headings and meta descriptions (and a whole lot more) are there to be optimized and including your keyword in a variety of different ways will certainly pay dividends.
This is easier than it seems if you are using WordPress and more specifically plugins such as All In One SEO or Yeost to name a few.
3- Interlinking
Adding additional content to your website is great and always encouraged, however are you really making the most of it if you are not then optimizing the content? I would argue not!
Interlinking the content to the necessary and most relevant pages of your site is going to add additional value and help to be viewed as supporting content to potentially a page you are looking to rank.
This will also help to give you some content focus moving forward as you will be able to priortise the importance of the content you are putting together as you will have one eye on how you can interlink it once it is added to your site.
4- Your URL paths are important!
Times are changing and so is the importance of your URL paths. Keep it simple, the shorter the better in many cases. Avoid the use of numbers and characters other than letters where possible.
Avoid something like this:
/page3/shoes/red36=4?
Shoot for the stars with something like this instead:
/Shoes/RedShoes
5- Site Performance
If you haven’t already realised that your traffics experience makes a huge difference to the results you achieve then you are way behind the times. One of the key indicators of this is going to be page load speed. This is something that needs to be monitored and cleaned up where possible. The faster the site loads the lower your bounce rate will be! Trust me this is a big deal.
Identifying areas of your individual pages that are either unnecessary or slowing the page down is the first step. Eradicating them is the second and arguably the most important.
If your page loads quickly and is optimized correctly then your performance should certainly move in the right direction.
6- Importance of ALT Tags
The amount of sites that are not aware of their alt tags and how they can help your ranking page if addressed is worrying. Altering your images Alt tags certainly helps and remember, as always, you want to keep it in line with the focus of the individual page.
7- Outbound Links
This is something that should be done only when necessary and certainly not overused, but if there is relevant pages on high quality domains that is highly applicable to what is being discussed in your content then an outbound link to that domain can have value.
This will help to show the search engines that you are a trusted domain within that specific topic area.
8- Plugins, plugins, plugins
Keeping on top of your plugins on your site imperative. Monitoring the backend of your site on a bi weekly basis is advisable to ensure all plugins are updated and you are operating your site on the most up to date plugins available.
9- Content is king!
Why do you think you always come across blog pages when you make specific google searches? Not only do they have authority based on the traffic they bring to the site but also because their site is a living organism that is continually being updated as a pose to a static site that has not added content since the day the site went live.
I firmly believe that content should be added on a monthly basis as a minimum and look out for an up and coming blog that will discuss the kinds of content you should be focusing on.
10- Indexing
Keep an eye on your ‘money’ pages to ensure you are being indexed in the primary search engines. Monitor that your pages are being crawled by the search engines and in turn that you are being found by your potential customers.
11- Ranking pages
Always ensure that the page you are wanting to rank for in the search engines is in fact the page that ranks. Sometimes the page you optimize to rank doesn’t necessarily become the highest ranking page.
As a result, further optimization may need to be done!
12- The truth about referring domains!
Your referring domain profile will go a long way to determine not only the authority of your site but also the performance of your site in the search engines. The truth is, you will naturally ascertain referring domains from the web and this is certainly not a bad thing but your going to need to do a lot more than just rely on natural referring domains in order to see improved performance.
There are a number of ways to add to your referring domain profile but doing it the right way will alway lead to better and more sustainable results.
Check out our referring domain blog post to learn more about the kinds of plan of actions you will need to implement in order to do it correctly.
13- Change your mentality
It’s time you start to turn your site into the go to website within your industry! Become a resource center than covers all aspects of your services! Don’t give the search engine or any of your traffic a reason to look elsewhere before making a decision to get in touch!
