The best place to start with improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website is typically with content. And you could be turning out dozens of pieces of content a month, but if they’re not optimized properly, they probably aren’t doing much for your rankings. Before you go and write all new content, make sure your existing content is at 100%. There area few small fixes you can make to help your rankings, and then use these tips as you continue to add content to your site.
TITLE TAGS
Every page on your site needs a custom title tag and title description that’s intriguing to the user and explains what the page offers. Make sure you don’t have the same title tag for multiple pages! If you have a WordPress site, add a SEO plugin to be able to add these tags and descriptions to each page.
If you’re new to SEO, title tags are what come up in Google, and act as a short summary of your site. This element is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization. Moz describes the optimal format as: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name.
FIX LOAD TIME
If Google has to spend a long time waiting for each page to load as they crawl through your site, you may get penalized (and your users will probably get frustrated). Your cool header graphic may look nice, but if it slows down your site, it’s not worth it. Compress the image files so they are easier to load, make images smaller, or find a way to redesign the page so it doesn’t require so many large images. This will help your site load faster and increase your SEO.
USE KEYWORDS (IN THE RIGHT PLACES)
You know not to keyword stuff – jamming your content so full of one keyword it comes across as spammy. But, you should definitely be optimizing each piece of content for a specific keyword. If you want to rank for “Cooking Class,” make sure it is in your title, first paragraph, header tag,s last paragraph, and you can even add it to your image alt tags and titles.
STREAMLINE
If you have three pieces of content targeting the same keyword, make one mega page about it. Find a way to incorporate all three blogs into the one blog that gets the most traffic. Don’t change it so much that you ruin your existing SEO rankings, so don’t delete too much of existing content. Not only can this give your site one power page for this keyword, it also gives you a new piece of content to promote, especially if you rebrand it as a master guide (or something like that). Make sure you redirect the old URLs from the previous articles to the new page.
RESEARCH THE COMPETITION
Search a term you are hoping to rank for. Then, read all the relevant articles from your competition that come up in the first page. How can you make your content better than theirs? How can your article be more helpful to users? Find ways to upgrade your existing articles to ask the questions users seem to be asking on search engines.
BUILD INTERNAL LINKS
External link building can be hard, but you can also do it within your own site! And the best part is, you get to make your own anchor text. If you’ve got a blog about kid’s cooking classes, link to the services part of your website that talks about the classes you mention. Instead of using your company name as the anchor text, try something like “kids cooking birthday parties” or “teach kids to cook” or whatever larger keywords you hope to rank for.
Before you implement these techniques, check what page you currently rank for your desired keywords. Try some of these tips on the content, then check back regularly on the SERPs to see where you’re going. And if you need some help with your own small business SEO, we can help.
