7 ways to use SEO effectively

Still not sure what SEO or Search Engine Optimisation entails?  You know its something that you need, but are just not sure where to start?  Well you are not the only one.  Its a ever-changing beast that needs to be fed to keep your site found.

Here are our top 7 ways that you can get better rankings for your SEO efforts.

1. Content quality and  be on trend (relevant)

All content should be on trend and relevant. If nobody is searching for the content there’s no point putting the content online. Remember the content you put online has the potential to reach a large audience and it reflects your brand and goes beyond SEO. Good content will be shared and you need internal links to build your SEO profile. Not only does the content have to be relevant but grammar and spelling mistakes are also picked up by Google’s new algorithm (Google Panda and Penguin), if your website has poor grammar your domain will be de-ranked.

2. Good titles and headers

Use the html headline and title tags more strategically. Pick your keyword you want to target (remember it should be on trend and relevant to your website) and place those keywords on your header and title. Title and headline tags play an important role in determining the rank, so pick good keywords that you want to be ranked highly for. Titles and headlines also grab the attention of the user, so don’t be generic; describe the article in a way that makes someone want to read further.

3. How Many Keywords should you target?

If you put a lot of the same keywords on your website or blog (often called keyword stuffing or flooding), not only does it look unprofessional and leads to poor content quality.  More importantly it’s detected as spamming on Google and de-ranks your domain. Each page should target only around 3-5 keywords or even fewer.

4. Target keyword density

You don’t have to write an old fashioned essay length page for your website pages, or directory submissions.  Around 300-1000 words is enough.
Blog posting can be shorter. A keyword for every 50-100 words is a good rule of thumb on the number of times you should repeat your targeted keyword. Remember, if you put too many keywords into your content, it will be detected by Google and yield poor topic-specific content so it’s bad for your brand.

5. Meta description tags

Although in this day and age meta tags have little impact on SEO it is important for other reasons. Meta description tags can allow you to insert 150 character descriptions of your content to be shown on most search engines when the page is searched for. This should be keyword-focused as search engines highlight the keyword searched encouraging clicks to your website. Go to Google and search for your business type in the search.  The snippet you read here is your Meta Description.

Meta Description = Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages. Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page.

Courtesy www.moz.com

6. Image labelling and relevancy

Great eye catching images will help grab the readers attention and encourage them to read the content. Your whole content, including your images should be keyword-focused -therefore your image names and alt tags of your pictures should all be keyword-focused.  Call them relevant file names before uploading.  Do a search for your business name and see what images appear when you do.  The better they are on trend and labelled correctly, the more they appear towards the top of searches.

Alt Tags = ALT Tags are invisible descriptions of images which are read aloud to blind users on a screen reader. Adding ALT text allows authors to include images, but still provide the content in an alternative text based format.

Courtesy  www.accessibility.psu.edu/images

7. Write your own content

Stop ripping off other people’s content as your own.  Not only does your content have to be good quality and on trend but copying content from other websites will also hurt you and de-rank your domain due to the recent Google’s SEO algorithm upgrade.

If you follow these 7 simple steps you’ll see your ranking growing steadily as time goes by.  And if its still bamboozling to you, contact us.