How do you do SEO for a website? Is a popular question that is typed into the Google search bar by many a website owner who wants to control and progress their online portfolio presence. Indeed, this particular question is a ‘featured snippet’ which in itself is a good indication of being a popular question! More about that later.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is the process of ensuring that your website appears highly in search engines and employs a variety of skills and strategies to get this done. An analogy could be that if your website is your virtual shop then your SEO is all the roads and signage that lead to it.
Most businesses now have a website (or some online presence) in order to reach out to new clients and to give people information about their products or services. It is therefore sensible to assume that if your business has a website to find new customers then your competitors will also have websites for the same purpose. You will all be trying to get seen by your audience and get to the top of those search engine lists to be the best, most credible business. So how can you maximise your chances of being seen above your competitors?
SEO recommendations
Let’s get one thing clear before we go any further: SEO is best done by a professional who knows their stuff. You can certainly make progress doing SEO yourself, but it is an ongoing process that requires time and attention. So, do what you can but if you do have a budget to invest in this field then contact us for advice and assistance.
Here are some fundamental areas of SEO on which you should concentrate to give your website the best chance of being found on search engines:
LINK BUILDING – this is your most important factor of being found online. Link building involves being cited by other websites who put a link to your site on their own website. The more credible the linking site, the more points your website get for SEO. Take the time to reach out to other website owners for links. If you write blogs or articles, then cite other websites as references then tell that website what you have done. You never know- they might want to link back to your article giving you that all important link
SITE SPEED- Google place a lot of importance on how quickly your site loads. So do your viewers. Crazyegg.comreport that a 1 second delay in your site loading speed could equate to
· 11% fewer page views
· 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
· 7 % loss in conversions
You can check this using the free Pingdom site speed checker.
You can help to ensure your site loads quickly by
· minimising the size of images on your website
· Do not host videos on your website. Put them on Vimeo or YouTube and embed them on your site.
· Make sure the important info loads first (before the viewer has to scroll down)
· Try not to use too many plug ins on your site. They all take time to function
· If you have ever changed your website structure or domain name you will likely have used 301 redirects to push those old broken page links to the new ones. Too many of these can harm your site speed.
· Monitor your site speed over time to ensure that whatever improvements you make are working.
· Monitor your mobile website speed. Use Think With Google to test your website load speed on mobile devices. Not only will this free tool check you site speed, but it will also give you recommendations on how to improve it on a report compared to industry leaders or your competitors.
Here’s an interesting thing: I conducted a site speed test for my own mobile site, and it could have been better. I will be working on this accordingly. However, I then ran tests on some of my key competitors too and their sites were even slower! A fast-mobile site should load on 4G in about 2.5 seconds. Some of my competitors were taking over 7 seconds to load. Great news for me! So make sure your website loads fast in comparison to your competitors. The lesson here: check out what your competitor sites are doing too!
KEYWORDS
This is something that I have covered before; I could probably write a book on this subject! Keywords are important to your overall website SEO strategy but link building and site speed. I have covered how to find website keywords in another article so won’t go into detail on this here. Head over to that blog if you would like to find out more.
STUFF WHICH YOU PROBABLY CAN’T DO
Some things which can be done which you might need a professional for would be minifying and combining files, asynchronous loading, deferring javascript, reduce server response time… shall I go on..?
I didn’t think so…
Don’t feel disheartened though – there is plenty that you can do as outlined above and if you focus on link building and site speed you will surely benefit.
I will be writing another article soon on the subject of ‘off page SEO’. This will look into driving traffic to your site using social media and directories. If you would like any advice or further information about SEO then get in touch with us on info@fullcirclewebsitedesign.co.uk
So now you know a bit about how to do SEO for a website. Good luck and stick at it!