When it comes to running a business, most people know that having a website is crucial.

But once your website is built, what are you doing to make sure that people can find it easily?

 

Here are 8 super simple SEO tips that most business owners ignore.

 

1. Choosing Clear Keywords

Knowing what your website is about is one thing.

Knowing what people are Googling to find your products and services is something else entirely.

Finding the right keywords to target for your SEO is the essential first step to take when optimising your website.

 

2. Customising Title Tags

I’ve lost count of how many websites I’ve audited where the title tag is simply the name of the page.

This is the worst when it’s ‘Home’ or ‘About Us’.

This literally tells Google nothing about your page so it has to work even harder to realise what your page is about and whether it would be a good search result.

Writing clear and customised title tags gives your website a definite edge over sites that aren’t using this feature of their website.

 

3. Writing Clickable Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are connected to your title tags in that whatever keywords you’re using in the title tag should be reflected in your meta description.

This helps you pack the most SEO into your page’s punch.

But make sure they are grammatically correct and entice the searcher to click through to your website. Add a call to action or a great reason to make people click.

Being seen on the first page is great, but getting clicks is the ultimate goal.

 

4. Creating Relevant URLs

Have you ever copied an existing page on your website in order to create a new one?

Did you check the new page’s URL before you hit publish?

I see this rookie mistake all the time – instead of being a custom and relevant URL, it’s something like ‘/copy-of-XYZ-page/’ or ‘/XYZ-page-1/’.

This isn’t great for the user, nor for SEO, so always edit your new URLs when copying existing pages BEFORE you hit publish.

 

5. Adding Internal Links

Internal links have been talked up as a ranking factor, and while this isn’t quite accurate, it can indirectly benefit your SEO efforts.

Internal links help Google to work out what your pages are about, so adding internal links in appropriate contexts is helpful to Google and therefore makes their job of returning the most relevant results much easier.

 

6. Linking On The Right Keywords

When adding your internal links, think about the keywords you are using to link on – commonly referred to as anchor text.

Adding a link on the words ‘click here’ gives the user and Google very little to help understand where they will go and why they should even click in the first place.

Adding links on the keywords you are targeting is a great way to help users navigate your site, and tell Google what your pages are about too.

 

7. Optimising Images

So often I come across websites where it’s clear that zero thought has gone into optimising their images.

There are a few things to think about when it comes to image optimisation.

Firstly, the image file name. When’s the last time you checked your image names? Are they all something random like ‘IMG825949-gnsoghes-42’? Well that’s no good to anyone, is it!

Before uploading any images to your website, make sure they are appropriately named.

Not only does it make it easier for you to find your own images in your image library, but it makes it easier for Google to work out what your images are about.

Secondly, make sure they are as small as they can be.

Large images will slow your website down, take ages to fully load, and more than likely lose you some visitors who can’t be bothered to hang around waiting for images to appear.

A tool like TinyPNG is great for this.

Third, add alt-text to your image.

This is traditionally used to describe the image so that when blind people are on your website, the image alt-text is read out by their computer screen reader.

For this reason, keyword stuffing your alt-text is not recommended, but adding something descriptive and useful both for users and for Google is.

Alt-text and file names are the only things Google can ‘see’ from your image, so use these fields wisely.

 

8. Writing Blogs 

Now you don’t HAVE to write blogs in order to rank well.

However, as my favourite SEO guru Kate Toon once said, ‘every page on your website is another ticket in the SEO lottery’.

Got a one-page website? That’s one chance to rank in Google.

Got a 5 page website? That’s 5 chances to rank in Google.

Got a 10 page website with 25 blog posts? That’s 35 chances to rank in Google.

Now, this isn’t to say go wild and create as many pages as humanly possible. Please for the love of God, don’t do this!

Any content you create, whether it’s static pages or blogs, needs to be the best content it can be for it to have a chance of ranking well on the search results page.

If you don’t have the time, the skills or the inclination to write your own blogs, let me do it for you!

Blogging for businesses is one of my most favouritest things to do and I’d love to help you create awesome content for your blog that gets you noticed online.

 

And there you have it – my 8 super simple SEO tips that most business owners ignore. No excuses now – login to your website and start fixing them.

If you would rather hire a digital marketing specialist like me to do this for you, I’d love to help.

Get in touch with me now and let’s chat!