Search engine algorithms, such as Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, tend to undergo constant changes throughout the year, thereby keeping inbound marketers constantly on their feet. However, SEO (search engine optimisation) strategies stay relatively consistent even as search engine algorithms are updated or revamped. SEO is a strategy that companies use in order to boost the web rankings of their website, thereby helping to increase traffic to your page as well as the authority of your brand.
The first step of a successful online marketing campaign is to optimise your site. By optimising all of your website’s content, you’ll be establishing a strong foundation for your SEO campaign.
The following are 6 steps that you should follow in order to improve your search engine optimisation:
1. Use meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are basically the descriptions of what each one of your web pages contains. Meta descriptions are often overlooked, which is a mistake as they can help you to generate more traffic to your site. You are allowed to use between 150 and 160 words for your meta description tags. Not only should your meta description properly describe the content on your page, it should use several keywords as well.
Not only can meta descriptions help boost your webpage’s ranking, they’ll also make your pages more enticing to web users.
2. Add image alt attributes
The importance of images cannot be understated. Not only are web users more attracted to visual content, search engine algorithms take images into account when determining your site’s web ranking. This is because the search engine will recognise the image alt attribute, which is the text of a photo. So be sure to add alternative text to all of your images in order to provide more accessibility to your users as well as to give the search engines the ability to better index your website’s images. Don’t forget to use keywords in your text as well for even stronger results.
3. Consider the body word count
Finding the balance with the word count for your content is also something that you shouldn’t ignore. Too short, and the content won’t seem like it has much value – too long and readers may choose to skip it. General consensus is that the perfect balance is 300 – 450 words. A piece of content containing 300 words is considered to be enough to effectively communicate a basic idea to the reader and to keep the reader engaged.
Using relevant keywords within that body word count will help make your content more attractive to search engine rankings as well.
4. Create effective page titles
The title tags for each web page will help users as well as search engines know what the topic of each one of your web pages is. Not only should they describe the topic of the page properly, they should also contain the keywords that a user would search for in order to find content on that subject matter. Be sure to use different title tags for each page so that search engine algorithms can tell the difference between each one of your web pages.
5. Use header tags
Header tags are an incredibly useful tool for your content that have several functions. First of all, they help to break up your content into sections, making it more visually appealing for readers. Nobody wants to read through a giant block of text after all. Each header tag should provide information about what the following section contains. This helps search engine robots to comb over your page and recognize the different ideas and topics.
However, you’ll want to keep them short and simple in order to prevent search engines from decreasing your ranking. Header tags also allow readers to glance over the entire content in order to get an idea of the basic ideas that you go over, which can be incredibly helpful in convincing the user to read the entire piece of content.
6. Avoid using duplicate content
Search engines go out of their way to make sure that your content is unique and original. This means that you should not only avoid using content found on another site, you should avoid duplicating your own content as well. In fact, using duplicate content can actually hurt your search engine ranking.
These are 6 of the search engine optimisation steps that you should follow in order to make sure your website is fully optimised, thereby ensuring a strong search engine ranking for your website.