This text has been hanging around on the old version of my website for a number of years now. It IS actually good enough to be included in the marketing blog. I finally have made time to correct the grammar (although Tolkinas didn’t do a very bad job), validate the information, and append it to the marketing blog.
SEO is learning how to change some terrible habits that people develop because they are hasty in pushing stuff to their website.
If you are wondering what things people can change with minimum technical knowledge without the support of a developer or the need for an agency, here’s a small list of things that can really set you apart when you start your business website.
URLs
Make sure that your URLs are short and user friendly. There are studies done that really prove that short URLs are not only user friendly but also most of the pages populating the top 10 within the SERPs have short URLs.
Add your main keywords to the URL. People often mistake this as old SEO advice. URLs that contain the main keyword not only rank slightly better but get a lot more attention from the users looking through the SERPs. E.g. I would prefer to click on a result that looks like this example.com/espresso-machine instead of example.com/machine-123
Titles
Write unique titles for every page / Try to target one main thing per page. Keyword Cannibalization is an enormous problem. Again, this is not just an SEO play. It’s a marketing issue. Imagine spending a marketing budget for creating a landing page for a product or a service just to only find out that half of your organic searches land on a page that is not optimized for conversions.
Keep titles under 60 characters
Make sure that you have goals set up. Most times, businesses rely on branding. IF that is the case, put your brand name early on and sacrifice your keywords. My personal experience is that SMBs, and even sometimes corporates, prefer to sacrifice the branding for the ranking. That is something you’ll have to decide. Whatever you do, keep them short.
Add the main keyword in the title
Titles are an on-page ranking factor, probably the single most powerful one that you can really control easily no matter where and how your site was built. Add the main keyword in the title to help boost your ranking for it.
Put the keyword closer to the start
There are studies that show that putting the keyword at the start of the title has improved CTR.
Meta Descriptions
Write unique meta descriptions for every page. If you have a small website, try to write unique meta descriptions for every page. It will improve your CTR and it will really improve your user experience. It’s not an SEO play, your keywords won’t be positively affected (directly).
Keep your meta descriptions under 160 characters
Longer than that and you risk truncating your meta descriptions and maybe creating a degrading experience for the user that tries to read it.
Add main and relevant keywords
Add relevant keywords if they fit and read nicely. It will make your result stand out in the SERPs if someone searched using a related keyword and your title is not emboldened.
Headings
Write unique headings for every page
Headings are not so much associated with rankings anymore but improve the ability of search engines to understand the context of a page.
Every page should contain at least an H1
H1 is the only heading that might still have some value as a ranking factor. Non the less Google and other search engines use it to figure out what the primary subject of the page is.
H1 and title should be different
As previously said, titles are ranking factors if, by any slight chance, H1s still hold any real value as a ranking factor, it would be a waste to duplicate them.
Make sure they make sense, but they are at least slightly different. If you have long articles, add H2s and H3s when appropriate
A proper structure requires some sub-headings. Again, no matter their ranking value, having a clear content structure (and ordering) can boost your organic visibility. Engines understand better what you want to say, so they serve your articles to the right people, at the right place, etc.
Image Alt Tags
All images should contain descriptive alt descriptions
An alt-tag or alt description is very helpful for engines to understand the image and its purpose in the content.
Add your keywords but don’t over-optimise
Using the keyword in the alt description can help your image rank accordingly in the Google images but also boost your overall ranking of that keyword in Google Search.
Visually impaired people rely on these descriptions to understand the image – so do engines. People with visual disabilities need those helpful descriptions in order to understand the image.
Keyword Research
Perform keyword research for every service or product you are selling
Keyword research is an important part of having a business. The information that you can extract by performing keyword research goes far beyond the SEO-sphere and rankings. Even though you can get an idea of which keywords you should try to rank, you also get an idea of which you should steer clear.
You discover competition, and you can compare strategies.
Content Optimization
Optimise the content of every page.
Use your findings to create relevant, unique and valuable content for your site. Content does not equal just blog articles. Content can be found within listing pages, item pages, search pages, tag pages, home pages, etc. Make sure you optimize them as soon as you build them. Especially when your site is young, you can’t be sure when Google will give you the time of day to crawl your pages again or even more importantly, when a user will give you another chance. Once you lose credibility with a user, it’s very hard to win it back.
Performance
Performance might sound overly technical, but you can really make a difference by taking some easy steps.
Optimise your images for web usage
It’s not a great idea to just post any photo on your site without first optimizing it for speed. If this is something you feel not comfortable doing or not know-how, try finding a WordPress plugin if you are a WordPress user or you could use websites such as https://squoosh.app/ which is a web app created by Google to help you optimize your images.
Use a CDN
CDN = Content delivery network. They can help your site load faster, improve your security, etc. If you are not sure how to use them or how to find them, one of the best CDNs out there is called CloudFlare and they offer a free service, you could easily follow some steps to set up.
Don’t use GIFs use videos.
Simple advice. If you think GIFs are fun and want to use them, convert them to videos and loop them. It will make a tremendous difference.
Limit the use of plugins if possible
You don’t need to have 100 plugins to have a nice-looking website. If you have a lot of them installed, consider which ones you need and which ones you don’t. Clean up your database.
Security
Create a secure environment for your users
Use any measure possible to create a secure environment for your users. If you are collecting data or if you pass them to 3rd party vendors make sure you let them know.
Use HTTPs instead of HTTP
HTTPs are not a mystery anymore and it doesn’t really require technical expertise. You can find a host that provides a free SSL certificate. If your hosting provider does not provide free SSL, you can buy one or find a free external service such as https://letsencrypt.org/ .
Internal Links
Make sure you have links pointing to all of your valuable pages. Engines or to be honest, the entire worldwide web work using links. If they can’t find a link for a page, then that page will never make it to the index.
Try to minimize the jumps a search engine and a user has to do in order to reach to the end page. The easier you make it for engines to find that link, the quicker they will index it. You should try making your entire site’s pages being accessible within 3 clicks.
Use friendly anchor texts
Anchor texts are helpful for engines and users alike. Knowing what I am going to see when I click a link makes my decision to follow it much easier. Engines consider anchor to be a ranking factor for backlinks but a great hint for internal links.