When it comes to SEO, there seems to be a certain level of perceived mysticism that comes with it. In reality, search engine optimisation is no enigma and can be carried out by anyone with just a little know-how. Here are a few handy hints and tips!

Looking after a website's SEO is similar to caring for a garden; you have to maintain regular upkeep. If you want to move up search engine rankings and stay there, you can't simply employ some on-page optimisation tactics and then leave it.

To extend the gardening metaphor, this would be like be like giving your plants a good water and some nutritious compost and then abandoning them in a dimly lit corridor.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves though. Here are some simple on-page SEO tips that you can employ to make your pages more attractive to search engines.

Content

Content is the most important thing about your page. Target some keyword phrases that you want to optimise for and make sure the primary one appears in the text three times - anymore and the search engines will rank you down for keyword stuffing. The keyword phrase should be something that people would type into a search engine to find you. Underline one, italicise another and embolden the third.

Title tag

A title tag is the main text that describes an online document - the words that appear in the tab of your browser when the page is open. These should be no more than 60 characters long and the keyword phrase should be near the start.

H1 and H2 tags

Make sure your primary keyword phrase begins the page. Making it the primary heading (H1) or secondary heading (H2) ensures this.

URL

Check that the URL is clear and contains the keyword phrase you are optimising for.

If your page is about technology PR, your URL might look like this -
http://www.stonejunction.co.uk/technology-pr.htm.

ALT attributes

If you click on the link above and hover over any image on the page, including the social media logos, you'll find that the keyword phrases appear. These are ALT attributes and can be added to any image on your page to help optimise it.

The light

That's enough of the water and compost. As previously mentioned, these are all well and good but if you haven't got any light shining on your website then there's only so much you can expect your views to increase.

The light source is inbound links; building these is referred to as off-page SEO.

Creating good quality links to your pages is a sure fire way to move up search engine results. The best thing to do is to naturally create inbound links - even better if these come from https://, .org or .ac.uk websites.

The worst thing to do is to pay for link building schemes that set up pages crammed full of links. Search engines have algorithms that can detect these and will penalise your website by severely axing its ranking. You'd be lucky to make page 50.

Off-page SEO is the most time consuming, but the most rewarding when it comes to achieving better rankings in search engines. Building good quality inbound links provides the nourishing sunlight needed for your plants to grow.

 

By Adam Steele, Stone Junction Ltd. 

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