SEO: The Basics – 6 SEO Tips every page should use

Now that you’ve created your website, you’ll want people to be able to find it. 

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, refers to the process of enhancing your website so that it’s more likely to be discovered by people when they use search engines like Google or Bing. This can be done by including relevant keywords that people might look for throughout your website, producing a steady stream of high-quality content, removing any large and unnecessary files and having other websites to include links to your site.

Search engines work by ‘crawling’ websites; reading their content and data and pulling them into an index. When someone uses a search engine, the engine takes the keywords suggested by the user, compares them to the index and then offers the user the most relevant websites.

SEO can be extremely beneficial – it not only helps increase your search rankings but also improve your site from the viewpoints of both search engines and visitors. That said, quality content should be your ultimate goal when it comes to SEO, rather than finding ways to trick search engine algorithms.

Here are 6 SEO tips that every site owner should use to help their site naturally grow in popularity and in rankings and also offer a better experience to their visitors.

Tip 1: Create great content

Your content is the most important aspect of your site and of our optimisation efforts. Even with the best SEO tricks up your sleeve, you won’t be able to get in front without great content.

Why? It’s simple. You might be able to trick search bots for a short while but if all you have to offer is low quality content, absolutely no visitor is going to share it with the world or ever consider coming back. So, what’s the point?

When you make an effort and create unique, informative, purposeful content, it will be widely read, appreciated and shared which creates excellent link-building opportunities for your site. So, put in the time to generate content that attracts love and links.

How? Use all the tools at hand, including your social media channels, to find out what problems your audience has and write content that provides solutions and helps solve those issues.

Tip 2: Carefully research keywords

Keyword research is one of the most important parts of a successful SEO strategy. In fact, it’s the foundation upon which everything is built. Use tools to gather keywords and compile a list of the most commonly searched for keywords and phrases in your niche and then use them to optimise all your content.

Scatter them strategically throughout your content – headlines, sub-headers, body copy, meta descriptions, etc. Just make sure you don’t overdo it to the point that it’s stuffed with keywords and the content reads unnatural and forced.

Tip 3: Use Meta descriptions

The meta tag is a short summary of the content on a web page and although it’s not visible on the site, it shows up on search engine results. This means that your potential customers will see it in search results when looking up your products or services online. In fact, it’s what helps users decide which link to click from so many options.

So, the best thing you can do is come up with a unique meta description for each web page, 150 to 170 characters long, optimised to include relevant keywords. You may have noticed that when searching on Google, the keywords are highlighted in search snippets which helps grab the user’s attention and shows relevance to a specific query.

Remember that the meta description should lure your audience to click on your link rather than your competitor’s. So, make it informative and catchy at the same time.

Tip 4. Diversify your anchor text

If every link to your site reads “buy cheap all inclusive holidays to Spain”, it might as well read “spam spammy spam”, especially if it’s in a sentence such as:

“Buy cheap all inclusive holidays to Spain! Find the perfect hotel to suit your needs and holiday budget.”

Does that look natural to you? Of course not. So, try to come up with a natural anchor text that is relevant in the context of the content on that page or what you’re linking to.

Tip 5: Build internal links

Internal link-building is an on-site SEO tactic that focuses on creating an organised link structure among your site’s pages. In simpler words, your web pages should be connected to each other in a hierarchical or web-like connection of in-page, text-based hyperlinks.

A helpful internal link-building tip is to create a sitemap for your site that helps search spiders index your site easier and faster.

Tip 6: Build external links

External link-building is about encouraging the creation of backlinks to your site from external sites. It’s a slow process, but it really pays off in the long run.

Attracting links to your site plays a major role in helping your site rank well on Google. However, you need to do your homework so you know who you want to attract a link from, what topics they’re interested in and the answers you can provide. Then you can start creating useful and engaging content that people actually want to link to.

Any other SEO tips you’d add to our list? Make sure you share yours in a comment below.