Do you want to increase the number of people on your website? As the busiest months of the year are approaching, people will flood to search engines like Google to buy gifts online. So, you need to make sure your website can be found easily on search engine results by helping it rank higher and stand out amongst other websites. An easy way of doing this is by improving your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
1. Check Your Content
Use Keywords
When someone searches for something online, the search engine scans the words on each website. It looks for words or phrases that’s similar to the search. So, it’s important that you have ‘keywords’ on each page on your website. To get the most out of your keywords:
- Keep it relevant – Expand one generic word to two or three specific words. For example, we (Blacknight) provide hosting, but we don’t want people who are looking for party hosting to visit our website. So, we mention ‘website hosting’ throughout our website pages and blog posts.
- Keep it relatable – Use question keywords. When you search on Google for a product you sell, what are the questions that auto fill? Use those questions as text in your website pages to attract people who are searching for answers.
- Keep it recent – Always update your keywords. Whatever keyword is popular now, may not be as popular in a few months’ time, so make sure to update any keywords that are outdated.
Get Backlinks and Remove Broken Links
One of the most important parts of SEO is link building as search engines use the quality and quantity of links in determining the website’s ranking on search engine results. When other websites have links to your website, your SEO is boosted. These are called ‘backlinks’. To get them, publish content with information that other websites can link to (like how-to blog posts and guides), ask people to link to your website, and link to your website yourself through your social media accounts.
If you created a website when you first set up your business and haven’t updated the content since, one thing you need to check for are broken links. If you have links to other pages or external websites on your website that don’t exist anymore, delete or edit them. This can cause people to leave your website and ruin the quality of the links, which hurts your SEO.
2. Enhance the User Experience
Increase Your Website’s Speed
Websites that load quickly are much preferred by search engines and users. If someone lands on your website and it takes too long to load, they’re going to leave. This increases your ‘bounce rate’. A high bounce rate is unfavoured by search engines. You can test your website’s speed on Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
To help your website to load faster:
- Use a hosting solution like WordPress Hosting that prioritises page load speed.
- Optimise your images by reducing their size or quality.
- Deactivate unnecessary plugins that you aren’t using any more.
Make the Website Mobile Friendly
Remember to include website visitors that browse the web on their phone. Your website could look great on a desktop but could be difficult to use on a mobile device. Tap through your website on your phone and see what the menu’s design is like and if the content can be viewed easily. You can do this while creating or editing your website design with a website builder that allows you to preview how your website would look on a phone, like SiteBuilder.
3. Improve What Users Can’t See
Add Alt Tags
An alt tag is a description of an image or video for those that are visually impaired. Alt tags allow Google to better understand what the image and video is about, and in turn, what the website is about. This can help increase the chances of your images appearing in image search results.
Use Meta Descriptions
Like an alt tag, meta descriptions provide a summary of a website and what’s on it. Search engines can scan meta tags and improve the website’s ranking in search results, so it’s crucial to have them.
Now that you know how to improve your SEO, start making the changes according to the checklist above and get more website users.