search engine optimization
search engine optimization

Search Engine Optimization

SEO Tips 2018 Website Changes

Optimise Homepage

Ensure your homepage is optimised for your keyword term. Using Yoast or All in one SEO plugins will help ensure that you will rank for your key term. Use each keyword/phrase once on your website and that each page has an unique keyword/phrase otherwise you are competing against your own pages for ranking.

Image & Alt Image names

All images names and Alt Image text should include the keyword/phrase that you wish to rank for. Images need to be suitably sized and use a website such as tinypng to compress the images.

Page URLs

When you post news updates or create new pages on your website, ensure to use the keyword/phrase in your page URL or “slug”. If you wish to change existing ones, you will need to put redirection in place as you will get pinned if search engines encounter page not found errors.

Title & Meta Tags

Page Title and Meta Tags need to be filled out including the keyword/phrase you wish to rank for. Yoast provides a handy tool for this for those that don’t want to edit website code.  Google has recently doubled  the amount of text it is showing in the meta description and you need to adjust your Meta Description content to reflect this.

Headings & SubHeadings

Ensure your headings and subheadings are optimised using only one Heading1 tag per page and using Heading2-6 for sub headings

Internal Links

Use internal links between all your pages. Link you blog posts to other pages/posts on your website to help search engine robots to search your website. Encourage visitors to stay on your website for longer with these links

Footer

This is one area a lot of people don’t realise is worth its weight in gold for SEO. Here you have sub-menus links to key content that is available throughout your website providing you with a lot of internal links which will promote those pages on the search engine ranking.

Longer Keyword/phrases

With the increased use of voice searches through Siri, Amazon Echo and Google longer keyword phrases will be increasing in 2018.

External SEO Tips 2018

Links to your website

Links from other high ranking websites is one of the key ways to get up the google ranking.  Write good articles where people want to link and share the content. There are a number of free websites that you can register your website to get started; goldenpages.ie, yelp.ie yourlocal.ie. Furthermore don’t buy links from anyone as search engines are aware of that tactic which will result in your ranking being penalised.

Claim your Business

Register your business on Google My Business and claim your business place on Google Maps. Google Maps will help with local searches in your area and will show you on the map even though you may not be ranking on the first page organically.

Keyword Searches

Use keywords/phrases that are being searched for as it is no use ranking for a term nobody is looking for.  There are many different websites which list the number of monthly searches for the keyword/phrase.

Competitor Ranking

Find out what your competitors are ranking for and where their links are coming from. Check their sitemaps to see what keywords you find in their links.

Website Page Speed

Check your website page speed on Google PageSpeed Insights. You should be aiming for a score over 70 on both mobile and Desktop, otherwise Search Engines may penalise your website for a slow loading time.

Local SEO

If you have a local business, ensure that your address features on the website and in Google My Business as this will give you added credit when a search is preformed locally for your keyword/phrases.

Sitemaps

For new or updated websites ensure that you check the sitemaps.xml that it is showing all the correct pages/tags/categories and then submit them to Google and Bing search engines