11 Tips to Improve Your Website For SEO
SEO helps your website rank higher on search engine result pages through organic search. It’s a challenging endeavour for digital marketers, mostly due to Google’s complicated algorithms, while needing technical expertise and time investment in content creation.
To help keep your website optimised, Traktion has compiled a checklist for you so you can step up your SEO game, rank higher on search engines and increase your organic reach.
1. Optimising titles and meta descriptions
- Limit your title to 70 characters and your meta description to 175 characters.
- It won’t influence your SEO ranking if you don’t have keywords in your title or meta description, but your audience will decide whether to click on your website based on these keywords.
- It is suggested that you still put in relevant keywords or call-to-action in the title and meta description.
2. Identify And fix broken links
When users click on your broken links, shows up as a ‘404 error.’ This creates a bad user experience, and it actually lowers your SEO score due to poor usability. To solve this, use tools like SEOprofiler to inform you which links are broken.
3. Compress your images using website plug-ins
Here are a list of plug-ins for the most common website hosts:
- For Wordpress: EWWW Image Optimiser, Compress JPEG & PNG Images and WP Smush
- For Squarespace: there are no third-party plugins; however, you can still compress the images before uploading them on the website. Tiny Png would be a good alternative.
- For Webflow: ImageAlpha( Mac), ImageOptim (Mac), Caesium (Windows), Tinypng.com (web-based), Pngquant.org (Mac + Windows).
4. Use Alt-text for images
Alt-text (also known as alt description) is used inside HTML text to replace images that don't load. Its function is to allow Google to understand the content of the image, so use relevant alt-text to help inform users what your images mean.
For example, this could be an alt-text for the picture above: <img alt="”one" grey="" rabbit="" and="" one="" white="" lying="" in="" the="" grass”="" src="”pupdanceparty.gif”">
5. Do Keyword Research
By knowing what keywords to put down on your website and its blog section, you have the possibility to create targeted content to appeal to your target customers.
You can either (1) search for your competitors, and understand what keywords they are using. Tools to search for competitors include SEMRush, Spyfu and Similarweb; or (2) discover your own keywords.
This can be done using the following tools:
Google Keyword Planner
You can access Google Keyword Planner once Google Ads has been set up. Enter your website URL, and the planner will show a number of suggested keywords for you. This shouldn't be use for a thorough keyword research, but this can be a good start.
Google Trends
This shows you how often a phrase is searched. You can check the frequency of the phrase you enter and decide whether it’s worth it to include the phrase as your keyword based on the search volume shown on Google Trends.
Google Search
You can utilise Google’s autocomplete feature to have a better understanding of what people are typing on the search engine after the first few keywords entered.
Ubersuggest
This is one of the famous keyword research tools, which would show you keyword suggestions, keyword ideas and content ideas.
6. Set Up Google Analytics
Through this, you'll be able to track user behaviour on your website and evaluate the success of your building your SEOs.
7. Build up backlinks
By having other websites backlink to your own, your website will gain more traffic (known as 'site authority'). To achieve this organically, it is extremely crucial to produce quality content consistently on your blog and/or social media.
8. Link internally
These are links that go from one page to another page on the same domain. By linking your pages, you spread ranking power across your website, and you also allow users to navigate your website naturally. However, it’s also important to remember that the linking between pages has to be logical, since search engines will penalise websites that link irresponsibly.
9. Optimise your website for mobile
Having a mobile-friendly website is crucial for SEO. Optimise your website for responsive design, with a vision for your mobile website’s site design and site structure, to drive more traffic.
10. Standardise your URL structures
The more standardised and descriptive your URL, the better the user experience. A standardised and descriptive URL also helps the search engine crawl to your website faster.
An example of a standardised and descriptive URL:
To check whether you have a standardised and descriptive URL, you can check the following:
- Your maximum directory level is 4
- Your URL is descriptive
- You've implemented 301 redirects to link old URLs to new URLs whenever changes are made
11. Set up Google Search Console and upload your sitemap
To make sure your website is always accessible for Google, you can generate a sitemap.xml file and upload it to Google Search Console. Sitemaps contains important URLs and meta data on your website. To generate sitemaps, you can utilise sitemap generators or your content management systems.
Google Search Console also can give you warnings to unnatural links and also provides data if you link it to Google Analytics and Google Ads. It provides tremendous values during your SEO monitoring process.
In conclusion...
SEO is a continuous process, but if you implement these best practices consistently over time, your efforts will certainly pay off.
If you'd like a SEO expert list to help run, execute and plan for your SEO strategy, Traktion.ai is here to help with our exclusive network of pre-vetted digital marketing experts. Find your marketer here.
