3 Easy Ways to Improve your Ranking

Setting up a new website can be a daunting task at the best of times, and that’s without considering how to get your site into the search index, i.e. getting your site seen.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can often be difficult to understand and involves complex processes, which, if not understood can result in your site not appearing anywhere near the first page on Google. As a consequence, you will not be found by potential customers, which ultimately could mean no sales.

But don’t despair, there are some simple SEO tips that you can use to improve your ranking which revolves around content, headings and links.

Content

Having good content on your website is possibly one of the most important factors in making sure that your website is found when people search for it. Content can come in all kinds of forms such as press releases, infographics or blog posts. Maintaining a blog on your website can be an easy way to get started and can be really effective. Well-written content is a great way to interact with potential customers and is your chance to sell your brand, market your business and influence buying-decisions, especially when it comes to research intensive purchases. Even better would be to make your blog a video as, search engines love videos.

However, it is not just blog content that you should focus on. It is also important that you have strong content throughout your website to help boost your SEO ranking. You should consider how your content is structured on each page to make sure it is easily digestible (nobody wants to read reams of block text). Make sure you consider keywords (the words associated with your business or service, for example, if you are a firm of accountants, one relevant keyword could be tax returns) when writing any content for your website, as this is what search engines will look for to figure out what your site is about and where it should be ranked. That being said the content also needs to be unique and purposeful to engage the reader. Copying content from somewhere else or simply linking to already published articles won’t help much. Search engines look for new content, they know when content has been copied.

Headings and Meta Descriptions

This section might sound complicated but it is actually fairly straightforward. It is first important to understand what we mean when referring to these terms. Headings or titles are the words that will appear first in blue when you search for something within search engines. It is important that your keyword should appear in the title, preferably as the first word. The meta description, on the other hand, is the part that will appear underneath the title in Google and should give a description of your web page. Most search engines will limit the meta description that appears on their page to 160 characters, so it is best to keep it short and sweet. You should also make sure you add your keyword in the meta description.

The headers and meta descriptions are often referred to as title tags and html tags, as they can be edited through the html on your page. If you have a content management system (CMS), then you should be able to easily edit the title and meta description yourself. Although adding keywords to your meta descriptions does not have a direct result on the search results it can help improve the click through rate (the number of people clicking onto your site).

Repair Broken Links

If you have followed these steps and you still feel your website ranking hasn’t improved, then you should investigate whether you have any broken links to your website. This is a common problem when you make changes to a website, create new pages or delete the old ones. You may also find that other websites have linked to your website incorrectly or may not have updated their information. There are some useful tools online that can help you find these broken links and take action. Google Webmaster Tools is a great free tool that helps you manage all kinds of aspects on your website. By using their ‘crawl errors’ report, for example, you can find broken hyperlinks which you can edit and make changes. If you find errors on other sites (third party sites) that are linking to your site you should contact the site owners who should oblige in correcting these errors. Although backlinks can be really useful in improving the ranking of your website, you should always opt for quality over quantity.

By following these simple steps you should be well on your way to improving your website’s SEO ranking and getting your business noticed. You should also be patient because it takes some time for search engines to index your site and for you to see results. To get your page indexed quicker have a look at some of our tips here

Although there is of course much more to SEO, these easy tips should help you to get on the right track.