3 Quick SEO Optimisation Tips

The words ‘SEO optimisation’ gets thrown around far too much these days as something that most people don’t understand, will never grasp the concepts of and are thought about as a job just for the professionals. Well, there is truth in those statements but there are also a lot of myths as well. The truth is, SEO is complex when you get down to its roots of it. Google changes its algorithms semi-regularly and these algorithms are used to determine who ranks higher than someone else on their Search Engine results page. This is difficult to keep up with and you do need to be a professional to understand to an acceptable level what the changes are and how they will affect rankings. However, this does not mean that you can not optimize your site quite well yourself. The better part of SEO is quite simple and here is how you can optimize your site and grow your site’s ranking without the help of a professional. Here are 3 easy ways you can give your site a well-needed SEO boost with very little effort.

Regularly Update your content

Google, Bing and other search engines jobs are to show users the most up-to-date and relevant content on the web. This means if you are a site that has regular news or blog updates surrounding relevant trending topics then you have a better chance of ranking higher. If you are a gym, then create a blog (ensure it is on your own site and not on Blogger.com or similar sites) and share information relating to new workout routines, nutritional information and healthy recipes. If you do this on a regular basis for a few months at least your site will increase dramatically in organic search traffic. This will begin to position you as a subject matter expert and as more visitors come to your site there are more potential customers. This does not mean you are giving away your trade secrets as there will always be far more to know than what you can write about.

Write about what is trending

A blog is great but if it is about a subject that no one is searching for then basically it is useless. So, how do you know what is trending? Well Google provides a very good tool in their Google Adwords account called Google Keyword Planner. All you need is a Google Email account to get access at https://adwords.google.com then navigate to Tools->Keyword Planner. What does this allow us to see? It shows us how many people search for search terms in certain locations around the world. To get an advantage we can base our content around search terms that have low competition and a high amount of searches. For instance, if we look at the gym example again let’s look at how many people are searching for ‘healthy recipes’:

We can see in the realm of healthy recipes in Melbourne there are a lot of searches but there are two great terms we could target here. One is ‘healthy dinner recipes’ and the other is ‘healthy breakfast recipes’. The first has 2,900 searches and only medium competition and the other has 880 searches and low competition. If there were blog posts relating to these two posts there is a better-than-average chance they would rank highly in Google’s results. This is just one keyword we searched for and over time if we wrote about trending keywords like this on a regular basis our site would rank higher and higher in search engines, and we’d have more visitors and hence more potential customers.

Structure your content correctly

There are many complex components when it comes to HTML but there are 3 easy ways to in how you structure your posts in a way that gives you an advantage without the need for an SEO expert.

1. Use headings correctly – Just as this post is structured with a heading that contains ‘Quick SEO optimisation’ and subheadings related to SEO optimisation you should also structure your content the same way.

2. Name things correctly – Ensure the URL of your posts isn’t www.domainname.com/p=?12 it should be something like www.domainname.com/quick-seo-tips. Next, name your images correctly. I’ve seen so many times images named DCIM-33.jpg when it’s a red boat or a black duck. If it’s a red boat name the image red-boat.jpg before you upload the image to your website. Google can’t read images but it can read their file name so when people search by images in Google, your image will have a better chance of being shown and hence you’ll open up more sources of traffic.

3. Give your images ALT Text – This can be done in almost any content management system very easily. We use WordPress for this site and as soon as we upload an image it gives us the option to enter ALT Text. This text should describe what the image is so if it is for red-boat.jpg the ALT text should be Red Boat. There are many other things you can do with the structure of your HTML but these are 3 quick wins you can do without the need for an SEO expert or web developer. If you’re looking for more quick SEO optimisation tips or would like to talk digital strategy then feel free to get in touch.