You’ve heard of SEO, and you know that you need to start integrating it into your website strategy, but how do you get started?
I’ll go through six simple steps that you can take to improve your SEO without having expertise or technical knowledge.
1 Register your website with Google Search console
https://search.google.com/search-console
Google Console is a portal provided by Google to allow you to submit your web site domain, sitemap and fix any broken links or pages on your website.
Although “search console” has a lot of settings, the main thing you need to do here is to submit your domain, and a sitemap, which will tell Google that you exist and start the ranking process.
You can use a plugin called Yoast SEO https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/ to generate a sitemap URL to submit, which will look something like.
https://yourdomainname/sitemap_index.xml
2 Register your Business with Google my business
This is Google’s business directory and allows you to add your company’s location to Google maps, accept Google reviews and publish content. If you have an optimised listing with detailed content, reviews and posts, Google will place you in the maps box effectively putting you at the top of the search for your “keywords”.
Visit this URL https://www.google.co.uk/business/ set up a profile and fill in all the required fields with detailed information. Then I recommend doing the following to make sure that your listing is optimised.
- Adding at least 10 images
- Getting at least 5 positive reviews from past clients
- Adding a new post at least once per month to tell people what you’ve been up to in your business.
3 Use Keywords in the URL
When your creating new pages, Instead of just writing a standard page name, try and fit some relevant keywords into your URL to let Google know what your website is about.
So instead of just using the the URL
“joeblogs.com/contact”
Go for something like
“joebloggs.com/best-brickie-in-leeds-contact”
4 Title those images
It’s so tempting to just add those images without optimising. I’m guilty of doing this myself, but taking that extra few minutes to add the image description
Google has a search engine which displays images which can bring extra traffic to your website, so make sure that you properly title your images before you upload them.
I use the following format which makes it easy to name images without having to think too much
Keywords – number of image – description of image
Jim-Monkhouse-Leeds-web-designer-1-Web Designer-working-on-project.jpg
5 Write Regular Content
This is the one that most people don’t want to do, but the fact of the matter is that longform pieces of content such as blog posts are integral to a long term SEO strategy. Yes a blogpost might take a long time to create but not only does it improve your SEO ranking, but it has the potential to bring traffic to your website for years to come.
It’s as easy as writing 750 – 1000 words per month on a topic that you have specialist knowledge in, and posting the link to your post on social networks.
6) Build backlinks by registering with free business directories
Backlinks are value indicators that show Google how important your website is. The more people link to you the more valuable your website is considered and the higher up the search engine rankings you’ll go. The quickest and easiest way to start building backlinks is to register with free business directories.
Here’s 10 free business directories to get you started.
Now it’s time to take action, if you’ve got a wordpress website and you know how to login to the admin, there’s no reason that you can’t get started on the above steps now and start improving your visibility on search engines today.
