There are a few simple steps you can take to make your website SEO friendly; hiring an expert may be the easiest option but not always the cheapest. Here are a few things you can do to ensure search engines recognize your site and rank it in a good position.
Firstly, you need to choose keywords to base your site around. Your keywords will be words you think your audience will type into search engines to look for your site. For example, if your website is for promoting your hairdressing service in Surrey, your keywords could be ‘hairdressers,’ or ‘hairdressers Surrey’ to add some locality to your ranking. You can use a free keyword research tool to discover how competitive your keywords are.
For your site to rank highly within search engine results, your keywords must appear in your website copy. However, this doesn’t mean stuffing paragraphs with keywords – it means using your keywords effectively to create copy that’s easy to read. A paragraph of copy plastered with keywords may attract Google’s attention but it won’t be easy on the eye and could deter a good customer away from your site.
Gaining links from other sites gives your site credibility (as far as search engines are concerned). The more links to your site (from other related sites), the higher your website will rank. A good way to make your own links is to use social media platforms to link back to your site – for example, you could use Twitter to link back to your site. You could also have a separate blog which links back to your main website – by updating your blog and keeping the content fresh you have more of a chance of your link getting spotted by search engines.
Your headings, titles and Meta tags are important and should include some of your keywords. Your title is the text that shows at the very top of the browser (above the address bar) and it is one of the first pieces of text Google will see. If you look at search results, you’ll see the page titles are displayed in bold and there is a small paragraph underneath the title describing the website. Page title content is displayed in Google’s results so must be keyword driven.
Another important piece of text is the Meta tag – a little paragraph summarizing your website. Google may pick up on this and use it as a paragraph to summaries your site in its search results – this is why it’s important to include keywords in your Meta tag. It’s important to use different meta tag descriptions for each page you have otherwise search engines will not pick up on it. If you have lots of pages on your site it may be difficult but there are tools you can use to shuffle words around for each new page. If you only have a small amount of pages, it’d be well worth writing out your descriptions for each page and including a few keywords. Each of your pages will appear in search results with lovely descriptions and will instantly make your site more appealing.