Improve your Website Optimisation: 5 top SEO tips

Search Engine Optimisation is all about improving the visibility of your website within the ‘Organic’ Search Engines.  Website Optimisation is essential if you want to perform well in the Organic Searches on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. WebResults.ie have outlined 5 SEO tips to help you on your path to website optimisation in order to strengthen your web presence and in turn increase traffic and conversions.

The most critical step in the SEO process is to choose the right keywords for your business.  This is essential in order to attract your target audience and for turning visitors into customers. Be as specific as possible as competition around keywords can play an important role and must always be taken in to account. Focus in on the keywords your niche market is most likely to search for to come to your website and use them in all the appropriate locations like your domain names, page title, content and URL’s etc. Including the appropriate keywords on every page will significantly optimise each page and make the pages more appealing for search engines, therefore, increasing your visibility on the web.

Having Meta Data in place for all site pages is essential to build web presence. Meta data provides information about a site which gives search engines an idea of what a site is about. Since Meta data is hidden away in a site’s mark-up, visitors can’t see it, but search engines can. The most important aspects are the Meta Title and also the Meta Description. Ideally the Meta Title should be no longer than 70 characters and should include the keywords / phrases the page is to be optimised around. The Meta Description should describe what is to be found on that web page, this should be no longer than 160 characters.

Link building is the practice of encouraging other websites to link to your own site. If other websites are linking to your website your link popularity will increase. As a result search engines will consider your website important, and in turn, this should lead to more traffic due to higher rankings. It is important to ensure when engaging in link building that you link with reputable websites that have mutual interests in terms of what you’re websites are offering. Even more importantly you should avoid link farms as recurring use of them could risk having your site blacklisted by Google.

Giving your Urls friendly names allows the URL to be more recognisable to the page visitor. It also plays a role in SEO as it allows you to include keywords and phrases for each individual web page on your site. This helps reiterate consistency and relevancy and will help improve your web presence on search engines.

Alt tags are the titles given to pictures on websites. You can see if they are in place by scrolling your mouse over pictures on a website slowly, if they are the tag will appear. ALT Tags are commonly omitted from web pages. If properly used, ALT Tags can be beneficial for numerous reasons:

• They provide further detail of an image, e.g. destination of a hyperlinked image

• Provides another opportunity to include the appropriate keywords on a page optimising that page further

• Enhances access for users with disabilities

• Allows users with text only browsers to understand what the image should contain.

• If a picture does not appear on a website for whatever reason, the alt tag will appear describing to the user what the picture contains.

These are just some SEO tips to help you on your way to achieving website optimisation. WebResults.ie offers a range of SEO services and can advise you on how to get the best results for your business. For more information please contact the WebResults.ie team at info@webresults.ie or 01 7163657.