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Having a website optimised according to Google’s ranking algorithm can go a long way toward generating free traffic for your website. The higher your website ranks on Google’s search engine results pages, the more people will see it, and the more authoritative your site will look for your products. Plus, it’s important for users to have a pleasant time with your website, to keep them coming back. Here are some on-page SEO tips to help your site rank higher.
Always provide fresh content
Having great, fresh content, regardless of SEO, is important. To human viewers, it makes your site look informative and updated, and gives them more confidence in using your website and purchasing from it. For Google, a constantly updated website is a strong SEO signal, and also gives you more pages to link to from external websites, which in turn provides an additional SEO boost. Make sure to write content that is relevant, and do research on what readers might want to see.
Use logical URLs
Most first-time website owners, especially those who use platforms like WordPress, usually miss out on the benefit of fixing their URLs and simply leave the automatically-generated URLs which usually contain numbers. If your page is about pasta, it doesn’t make sense for the URL to be example.com/blog/599. Instead, edit your URLs to be specific and relevant to the page, like example.com/food/pasta. This makes it easier for Google to categorize it as a search result for both food and more specifically pasta.
Optimise your title tags
The title tag is the text that appears on the bar at the very top of the browser window, and also appears as the clickable link in Google search results. To a human viewer, if your website is about pasta but the link in the search results simply says “Food,” he or she is unlikely to click it because they’re searching for pasta. It is better to have the subject of your page prominently displayed on the title tag, to convince the viewer to click through and actually visit your website. This, in turn, will send a signal to Google that your website is relevant to the keyword the reader searched for and boosts your search result ranking even further.
Use your keywords everywhere, but don’t spam
If your website is about pasta, you’ll want this keyword, as well as relevant words, to appear everywhere on your website. It should be present in title tags, in the content, description, and even in the alt attribute of your images. However, do not practice “keyword stuffing” or nonsensically repeating the keyword, because not only does Google penalize this, it also looks bad to a human reader.
Have someone audit your website
Even if you think you have the on-page optimisation down, it still pays to have a third party audit your website for anything you might have missed. Some specialists in website design in Oxford offer SEO and digital marketing services and they are usually more than happy to perform website audits, for free or at a minimal cost. Think of it as an investment to increase traffic and sales in the future.
