Our Top SEO Tips For 2019.
SEO Best Practices
Ranking well takes serious time and effort. Fortunately, there are some SEO techniques that are easy to implement and will bring home some decent results. The best part about this is, you can probably do everything yourself. Yes, that’s right, you don’t have to be a tech-guru to tick off most if not all of the items in this list.
1. Headings and Titles
Make sure all of your pages are targeting the correct keywords. Within the scope of search engine optimisation, the title tag holds the most weight. This means you should pay close attention to your naming conventions. The closer to the keyword, the better the title is. Also, make sure that your keyword is positioned at the start of your title.
The most important heading is the H1 tag, this should also be named in the same way as the title tag. As the H1 is the most important keyword on your web page, aim to position your H1 tag before the rest of your content.
2. Pay attention to your navigation
Your website navigation is considered to be one of the most important structural elements on your entire website. One of the main reasons for this is because these links are usually situated at the top of each page. Because of its position, search engines will automatically give these links a lot of weight. In fact, one of the main contributing factors for the homepage to hold such high authority in comparison to other pages is because the logo you see in the header is usually wrapped in an anchor tag which is linking to the home page. As this is usually the first link on each page, google often sees this as a very important page, so it should be ranked higher than most of the other pages.
In order for you to successfully optimize your website’s navigation, choose your links carefully. Make sure that the links that are included are links to important pages you want to rank for. Also aim to have your keywords listed in the link itself.
3. Add breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are very important for user experience. They also help out in so many indirect ways too. Breadcrumbs are a handy piece of navigation to help the user understand where about they are on your website but also how to get back to a previous page. They also help Google work out how your website is structured. That’s why it’s very important to make use out of these handy little doodads.
eCommerce websites can benefit hugely by implementing breadcrumbs. Many online stores link their products from their category pages, meaning that the categories send some page authority (link juice) to the product pages, making them hold more authority.
4. Install an SSL certificate
SSL certificates have been a prominent ranking factor since 2014. The reason for this is very simple… Security. Google, and many other search engines, want to make browsing the web safe and secure. In order to put this in to practice, Google has been rewarding those who do have an SSL certificate by improved search engine positions. In contrast, it has been penalizing those who are not committed to its cause.
5. Google MyBusiness Map Listing
This is one of the quickest items you can implement on this list and also one you can see the best results from.
People often overlook their MyBusiness account on google, however ensuring you create your account will get your website listed multiple times on Google. Not only that but this is a very useful feature for people searching businesses, making them easier to locate.
Making sure you fill out all of the required details correctly and adding a number of images will help build trust with your clients.
6. Pay attention to your images
Images take up the most amount of memory on your server. This means they take up the most amount of storage on your user’s device. This means they will also take the most time to load, slowing down the time it takes to load the page.
One of Google’s ranking factors is page loading speeds. That’s why it is important for us to reduce loading speeds as much as possible. Compressing your images can be done in a number of ways. If you are using a CMS such as WordPress then there are plenty of image compression plugins on the WordPress market. If you can’t make use of a plugin then simply download batches of images, compress them and then reupload them to your server.
So far we have only scratched the surface. If you are looking to take your website’s SEO to the next level, please call us on 01938 530260 or email us at: [email protected].