After launching your website, you naturally want it to be found. That’s why it’s important to focus on optimisations that will improve your website’s search engine rankings. This is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Below, we’ve listed some useful SEO tips to help you climb the online rankings.
Performance
One of the variables that determines your Google ranking is your website’s performance. If your page takes a few seconds to load, you’ll be penalised. Therefore, it’s crucial to focus on techniques that eliminate unnecessary loading times.
The simplest and most effective way to speed up your website is through caching. A cache is a snapshot of your website that ensures a page doesn’t have to constantly connect to the database to access the website content. The website is therefore served to the user as a static HTML file.
How do I do this?
If you use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal, you can install caching via a plugin. For WordPress, you can use WP Rocket or one of several free alternatives. These plugins often include additional techniques to improve website performance, in addition to caching.
SEO plugins
Speaking of plugins: if you use WordPress, there are several options for improving your website’s SEO functionality. It’s essential to give each webpage a meta title and meta description so that it displays clearly in search results. Plugins like Yoast and RankMath offer a quick way to do this. A good plugin will also scan your text and offer suggestions for improving your page for SEO.
Yoast and RankMath also help optimise structured data. Which brings us to the next point…
Schema markup
Structured data – or schema markup – is a way to tell search engines what type of content your page contains. For example, if you sell a product, you can specify that your page is a product page. This helps search engines better understand how to present your content, which can lead to richer search results.
For example, if your page is a review, it might appear in search results with a star rating. If your page is a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ), your answers might appear in search results when someone asks Google a question that’s answered in your FAQ.
Engaging content
In the 90s, keyword spam was still prevalent. People tried to manipulate search engines by cramming as many terms as possible onto a page. Search engine algorithms have since become much smarter and focus much more on relevant content for the end user.
We’ve already listed some useful SEO tips, but the most important is simply to write engaging text that is first and foremost meant to inform. You can, of course, also focus on keywords, for example, by using them in your title and introduction, but it’s also important not to overdo it. If Google gets the impression you’re trying to cheat their system, it might not be beneficial for your online ranking.
Recently, we’ve also seen that artificial intelligence has changed how people search for information and how search results are presented. People engage in dialogue with the AI and are therefore inclined to formulate questions instead of looking up individual words. Google will then formulate an AI-generated answer based on online sources. It’s very useful if your website is one of those sources, so make sure your texts are comprehensive and informative so Google considers them good enough to be included in their AI results.
Backlinks and social media
Your website and social media nurture each other. Writing content on your website and sharing it on social media increases your visibility.
It also means you create backlinks. These are links from other websites to yours. Links from other websites give your website authority, especially if those links come from major websites like Facebook and Instagram.
There are other ways to acquire backlinks. For example, you can ask a business partner to place a link to your website on their own site. There are also online catalogues of companies within specific sectors that link to those businesses. You can check if such a catalogue exists in your sector and ask them to add your company and website.
SEO tips summarised
We’ve listed some SEO tips, but the most important things to remember are two things: relevance and authority. If you want your website to be found, you need to ensure you offer relevant information and that your company and website exude authority.
Do you want to implement these tips but don’t have the time to work on a website? Interface Marketing can help you design and develop a modern website and write engaging copy.
