28 Aug Rocket your site to the top of search engines
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) may sound daunting and difficult , but in reality it isn’t rocket science, you just need to know what to do, where to do it, and how to implement it.
Since launching the new Ronin website earlier this year, I’ve been involved in the SEO of the website, and we’ve made quite a lot of progress in terms of improving our ranking and getting more traffic. In the current digital era with millions of people searching online, it is vital any UK business with a website needs a strong presence in search engines in order to attract potential customers. If your website isn’t in the first few pages of Google, you need to take action.
But where do you start? Well, it’s easier than you may think. If you focus on these 5 simple SEO tips, you can improve your search engine rankings. How do I know this? Because they worked for us.
Tip 1: Write and publish fresh, engaging content
Search engines like Google reward quality content. As Clare predicted in her blog, Marketing Trends to watch in 2013, content is having a bigger impact on SEO than ever before. The more original, engaging content you publish on the site, the more you will be rewarded, so make sure you write good content, update it regularly and make it rich in keywords (for some nice tips on creating quality content, see It’s all about what you say). Search engine robots read from left to right so you should ensure your most important words come first in your web page content. Also, your website should have a text to HTML code ratio of above 15%, anything below this probably means that your website needs more text content.
Tip 2: Build internal links
There are two different types of links – internal and external. Internal links are cross-links to pages within your own website, whereas external links are to someone else’s site. Building internal links is not only great for your readers, leading them to other interesting content, it also helps search engines to discover that content, and make the appropriate connections. For example, if like us, you have a blog in your site, you should always link relevant past blog posts in your new posts. Internal links also include links to your categories in your sidebar, links to different pages from within your header and footer navigation, a posts listing after your content, etc. Again, don’t forget your keywords, a link that says ”click here” will do nothing for your search engine efforts.
Tip 3: Make your images SEO friendly
In addition to building internal links within your site, you can also build links with images and these can be a great source for driving traffic and improving your ranking. Visual marketing is really important (see Milly’s blog: Get the picture: How to harness visual marketing), but the thing to remember here is that search engines cannot ‘read’ images. They can only see the descriptions, tags, and titles that you give your images. So all images should have these attributes defined – as with any text include those keywords to optimise your images for search engines.
Tip 4: Produce an XML Sitemap
If you haven’t got a sitemap in your site, do it now. Why? Because this is a really vital part of your website SEO. A sitemap lists which URLs are available for crawling and can include additional information like your websites latest updates, frequency of changes and importance of the URLs. In addition to having a visible sitemap in your website, you should make sure your sitemap has been submitted to both Bing and Google Webmaster Tools. A big bonus in using these tools is they will also give you a lot of insight into how your website is doing in search engines. Pretty cool, right?
Tip 5: Optimise your Meta Tags
Meta tags are a very important feature in the Html coding of your website. They store your website’s metadata – web page title, Meta description, keywords and robot tags. This is content that does not display as part of your website, but that search engines use to determine the content of that web page. The title and description are most important as these display in search engine results when listing your website, so have to be written with not just the search engines, but your customers in mind. You should make these the optimum length (approximately 65 characters for your title and no more than 160 characters for your description) and update them regularly – having a content-managed website that allows you do this offers a real advantage here.
So you see, search engine optimisation isn’t quite as difficult as you may have thought. You just need some knowledge of the web and the tools to get you started – if you need help with this, it’s worth speaking to a professional web design agency. I hope these simple tips help you out and encourage you to start doing SEO for your website – remember you will never rocket your website to the top of the search engines if you never try!