Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a practice used to make it easy for your website to be found through search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. SEO is an organic or non-paid method used to increase your website’s ranking on search engines for search terms related to your business or your website.
Good use of SEO should increase traffic to your website, and therefore increase your chances of making a sale and increasing your revenue. Search engines recommend your content to their users based on how well your content aligns with what users are searching for and how well you use SEO, and because search engine algorithms are often updated, SEO best practice often changes, too.
Here are three basic tips to help you ensure that people searching for anything related to your business see your website.
Content, content, content!
Content is still one of the most essential elements in optimising your website for search engines. Search engine algorithms rank websites that are updated often and have relevant content that users spend time reading. When you produce relevant content regularly this tells the algorithm that not only is your website up to date, it also provides value to users.
Your content is also where your keywords will be. Keywords are the terms related to your business or your website that people may be searching. This doesn’t mean you need to pack as many keywords as possible into your content – search engines are smart enough to detect such “keyword stuffing”, which will work against you because search engine algorithms penalise websites that do this by ranking them lower in search results. However, if your content has value for users and is relevant to their searches, search engines will rank your website higher in search results.
Headlines and meta descriptions
It is also important to make sure you use relevant, “clickable” headlines and meta descriptions for all your content (meta descriptions summarise the contents of the pages on your website for the benefit of users and search engines). The headlines and meta descriptions are the first thing users see in their search results, so make sure they are a true representation of your content while also being as enticing as possible to users.
Search engines also take your content’s click-through rate into account when ranking it. The more people who click on your website, the higher your ranking is, so do what you can to make sure people click on it!
Make your website easy to use (UI and UX)
Another element that search engines take into account when ranking your website is whether or not users actually spend time on your website – the longer they spend on your pages, the more valuable the search engine considers your content. If, for some reason, users click through to your website but bounce off immediately afterwards, this will negatively affect your search engine ranking.
You can prevent this not only through good, relevant content, but also by making your website fast and easy to use: avoid annoying pop-ups that cover the content users come to see; ensure that your pages load quickly by reducing the sizes of your images; and make finding information on the website easy through intuitive navigation.
It’s important not only that your website looks good and represents your brand, but that people find it easy to use.
These are just a few basic tips to make the best use of SEO. There are other ways to improve the performance of your website and its ranking, too, from technical back-end tinkering to writing fresh, relevant content – best practice in this field is never stagnant, so stay updated and optimise your website regularly.
There are also various tools that score your website’s search engine ranking and help you improve it by identifying areas where your website can be improved for SEO purposes, as well as possible keywords you can craft your content around. At Flow, our digital team’s expertise works in combination with these SEO tools and platforms to ensure that our websites strike a balance that pleases both the user and the algorithm.
Contact us today to find out how we can help optimise your website.