Top Three SEO Tips

We’ve talked a lot about SEO – search engine optimisation – and we’ve looked at a lot of different techniques you can use to improve how well your website performs in the search engines. There are so many things to think about when it comes to SEO that you may find it all a bit confusing, so here are our top three SEO tips. Spend some time on each of these areas and you should see a noticeable difference to your search engine position and an increase in traffic to your website.

Our top three SEO tips

Regular unique content
We can’t stress strongly enough how important it is to update your website regularly. The easiest way to do this is to build a blog, and then update it with new articles as often as possible – at least once a week is ideal, but more if you can! You don’t have to write pages and pages – in fact, it’s better if you keep your posts short and sweet because internet users tend to have the attention span of a gnat! Make your posts interesting, informative and entertaining and with any luck people will share your content and keep coming back for more. You can also use your blog to target very specific keywords, which is also really useful in improving your web traffic and search engine ranking.

Meta Data
The meta data for your website is part of the coding; it can include a page title, page description and keywords and  you can specify different information for every page. Manipulating the meta data used to be pretty much the only way you could influence your search engine ranking, but nowadays Google in particular places a lot less importance on it – but other search engines still use it to understand what your page is all about. Don’t be lazy when it comes to meta data – it’s easy to use blanket keywords to cover your whole site, but that won’t do your ranking any good at all. Make sure you set the meta data independently for every important page on your website so each page has different meta titles, descriptions and keywords.

Inbound links
Many people think it’s important to have lots of links on your website going to other places. Actually, the reverse is true – it’s inbound links that affect your search engines ranking. Inbound links – links on other websites that point to a page on your website – act like a badge of trust and authority. In other words, if a website thinks yours is a good place to connect with then the search engines see that as a sign of approval, and that gives your website a bit more kudos and moves you up in the rankings. Not all sites are equal though, and the search engines use a number of criteria to rank pages in order of importance. For example, the BBC website is given a “page rank” of 9 as it is seen as an “authority” site. The higher the ranking of the page, the more valuable the inbound link – so posting on forums on sites such as the BBC and including your website URL can be really useful.

If you’d like to find out more about SEO and how HodgesNet can help people find your website, have a look at our SEO Services - we even offer a Pay on Results SEO service. To find out more, give the team a call on +44(0)8432 894 402