5 simple tips to help boost your SEO
Did you spend this past year wondering how you could generate more traffic to your website, but kept putting it off because it seemed too difficult, or you simply didn’t know where to start? Then it’s time to make a plan for 2022, and actually put a cross through the “to do list”, and instead add SEO to your monthly maintenance checklist.
Not sure where to start? Let’s start at the beginning — Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is a method where you make changes to your sites’ content and structure. The search engines use this content and structure to determine how relevant your content is to the set of keywords a user is searching for. The more structured your content is, the better you’ll be ranked on the search engines.
Sounds simple? Well it used to be simple, way back when the internet first started. Back then all you had to do was include as many relevant keywords in your content as possible, and bingo, you’d be found. Did we mention that was back when the internet started?
Unfortunately it’s not quite as simple now, but there are some simple steps you can take to help improve your current rankings:
SEO apps or plugins
Many website platforms such as WordPress have applications or plugins that are geared towards helping you make simple changes to your website content and structure. They often guide you with step-by-step instructions for improvement such as; page title, page description — a short snippet that describes what visitors should expect to see when they land on your page and if you’ve used enough or too many keywords.
If you’re a WordPress user you won’t be hard pressed to find a great SEO plugin. A few tried and tested plugins include; Yoast, Rank Math, The SEO Framework and SEOPress. Pop one on your site and follow the set-up instructions, it’s a great place to get started.
Content strategy
If you’ve already got your SEO plugin running and are ready to take the next steps to boosting your traffic, you’ll want to take a look at a content strategy. By now you’ve likely heard the saying “content is king” and it’s true, but “good” content really is the important word that’s missing from that statement. In your content strategy you’ll want to share content in the form of blog posts that add value to not only your readers, but also show search engines that you’re an expert on your topic.
Start making a list of blog posts that you think would be of relevance to your readers, but will also contain relevant content and keywords that align with your brand. Using sub-headings throughout your blog (with relevant keywords in the heading), helps to not only break-up the content, but also helps the search engines better understand what keywords are the most relevant to your content.
Internal and external links
You’ve now written up a blog post or two and have it posted on your site, or perhaps you already have a few blog posts that you’d like to tweak to gain some more site traffic to. Apart from working through your existing pages to ensure you’ve covered the above items, you’ll also want to make sure your pages contain at least one link to another page on your website (internal link) and a link to a website of relevance to your content material (external link).
Broken links
Although the search engines will eventually pick-up broken links on your website and remove them from the search engines, you’ll be penalized by not taking care of them yourself. Therefore, it’s a much better idea to deal with those dead links before the search bots find them. You can do this by redirecting old or dead content to another page of relevance.
Google analytics
While analytics has been placed last on our list, connecting your website to Google Analytics is actually one of the first things that you should do. SEO is not a one-time set and forget thing, it’s something that needs continual monitoring and updating. When you have Google Analytics installed on your website you’re able to check and monitor traffic coming to your site. You can also use annotations to tag days where you received high traffic — such as days you ran a campaign, or days you added a particular website post. When you look back to a year from now at the spikes in traffic you’ll know where those spikes in traffic originated from.
If you don’t maintain your SEO, traffic will gradually start shrinking again, and before you know it, your traffic will be reduced to right back where you started. Be sure you not only install analytics on your site, but you continue to check the rankings and optimize your site on at least a monthly basis.