Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tips - industry leading advice!
The first thing I have to say about this is that the work needed to get your website ranked on search engines such as Google etc, should be a joint effort between you, as the site owner, and your website builder.
You must check that your web designer works on the back end of your website as far as the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is concerned. At Websites by Jane this is all part of the web design service.
Below are 3 elements that are vital to getting a good ranking for your website.
1. Website Content & Keywords
Your web designer should also ensure that the text on each page is SEO friendly. This means that the structure, (headings, paragraphs and lists) is correct and images contain descriptions and tags.
For your part your text should be clear, readable, relevant and contain useful information, grammatically well written and without typo's. The content should also be unique (no copy and pasting).
I will help you with your keywords, these are the words and phrases used by search engines to find your site so when people search for that keyword your site should be listed.
Stuffing a page full of keywords isn't the way to go, search engines are much more sophisticated than this. First and foremost the content needs to be readable, yes you do need to have your keywords in the text but mentioning them four or five times in a sentence is not going to be readable and will therefore not attract the search engines.
You should be looking at keywords making up 1 - 2% of your text, that's not overdoing it, and they should be well distributed throughout your text.
2. Writing and Posting Blogs
Blogging will greatly help your website's ranking. All of the sites I create contain a blog feature, you don't have to use this facility but I strongly advise that you do, and on a regular basis. You should be able to share your blog on your social sites, making it easy to get your posts out there to your followers.
When a site has a blog that is updated regularly, with posts that are high quality and on topics that are relevant to the audience, it can make a huge difference to how the overall site performs in the search engines.
Keeping a blog updated, keeps you site updated, Google and the like don't want to send their searchers to a site that is stale and may even have gone out of business, so let them know you're alive, kicking and waiting for those visitors!
Final word on blogs is that if you put out some great blogs on a regular basis then people will keep coming back to your site, and they will dwell a little longer as they read, rather than having just a quick look. This is a ranking factor, they are making a statement that says this site is interesting, and the search engines will like that. All of my web designs include a blog subscription form, if a visitor subscribes to your blog they will be notified each time you post, prompting them to visit your site to see what you have to say today, hence building the site reputation as one of interest.
2. Back Links
Another excellent site booster is to create back links (also known as 'inbound links' and 'external links'). This means placing a link to your site on another site, these links are considered an important signal by search engines when ranking a site.
Think of a back link as a recommendation, site A has a link to site B, hence site A must consider site B a trustworthy source.
Search engines prefer back links from authoritative websites over those from less trustworthy or unknown sites.
The more prestigious the site, the more weight the back link will be given, if your industry governing body had a list of service providers, make sure your site is listed, these are called High Authority sites.
Other High Authority sites are generally trusted sources of information such as, newspapers, well established sites, industry specialists and anything with a .gov or .edu
The UGC (User Generated Content) attribute was rolled out in 2019, these links are those that come from the likes of forums and blog comments. The attribute informs Google that the link has been placed by a user and not the webmaster. This means that if you can get a link to your site in someones blog then this will be seen as valuable, as the blogger is recommending your site.
I'm sure you thought now you have launched your new site you can sit back and relax, sorry but that's not how it works. The website launch is the start of your journey, be prepared to put a bit of work into that journey to make it exciting and profitable.
Remember, a cheap website doesn't mean a cheap web design service!
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