14 ways to improve SEO

There are many things you can do to improve SEO on your site. To optimise your whole site for search engines you’ll first need to outline what your site is about and its purpose in order to come up with the main keywords and phrases that will get you in front of your desired audience.

Unique Content

Well-written and unique content that focuses on your brand or businesses keywords or key phrases is essential to improve SEO and is an essential part of Content Marketing.

Internal Links

Back links will also improve your site ranking by making your hierarchy more accessible to search engines. Provide links from your home page to your most important pages and cross link posts to other posts with the full post name as an anchor text, rather than just “click here”.

External links

Likewise, and more so, external links to other sites will further help to boost site ranking by creating relevance when visitors click on your links to a related site.

Inbound links

This one is more tricky, and requires other sites linking to you. Other than just creating great content that others will share, you can ask…or you can start guest posting on other blogs, providing a link back to you.

Simple site map

Design your site with SEO in mind. Pages should link easily to one another and be navigable. Pages that don’t show up in your hierarchy will be non-existent to site searches.

Regular content

Fresh content makes your site more relevant to search engines. Try to upload at least two new posts per week and share it via social media. Blogs or news pages are brilliant for providing regular content and will improve SEO.

Quality content

Unique content must also be quality content. Try to make sure each post is over 300 words and that your key word or phrase shows up at least four times, including in the headline, in the first sentence of the copy and in one sub-heading.

Don’t overdo it

Search engines will look for natural language; if your post or page is overflowing with keywords it will have the opposite effect and count against you.

Keywords in URLs

Try using keywords in your page titles as well as in your post pages URLs instead of numbers. Some sites will automatically add number to url posts, for example http://www.shoutcontent/?p123, when you really need www.shoutcontent/what-is-content-marketing

Search phrases

Focus on a search phrase rather than an individual word when possible. Try ‘Content Marketing tips’ or ‘ways to improve your PR’, instead of just PR or Content Marketing.

SEO for images and ALT texts

Make sure image ALT attributes and link texts also include your keywords or phrases. Use the word ‘image’ or ‘picture’ in your photos ALT descriptions and captions as many searches will include one of those words. Yeost have written more on optimising images for SEO.

Sharing potential

Add sharing buttons, comments and like functions in order for your content or site to be shared and rated by readers. The easier it is for readers to share your content the more often it will be shared, thus increasing its readership and your site ranking.

One at a time

Give each page or post an individual keyword or phrase to focus on. Too many keywords at once reduce its relevance to that particular topic.

Use your location

Instead of saying ‘our shop’ say ‘our London shop’ or ‘our Westminster shop’ so that you show up in local searches. If you are talking about Edmonton in London – say that.

 

These are just a few of the many things that will help to improve your SEO. Now read what Content Marketing could do for your business.