Search engine optimisation is not a perfect science by any stretch of the imagination. One site can implement a tactic and get great positions on search engines, whereas another can do exactly the same and not get the same response. There are many different things you can do, ranging from essential steps to optional extras that could provide benefits. Here are some of our tips to get more website traffic.
- The most important thing from an SEO perspective is to ensure your website can actually be found by search engines. These services crawl for millions of websites every single day and only include a small selection of them on their searches. In order to get your website found, you need to make sure your robots.txt file allows crawlers to look at your site. If it doesn’t, there is no way you’ll get a good position in their rankings.
- Having internal links is good for navigation and helps visitors to find their way around with your site more easily. You need to ensure that each link works; visitors don’t want to see broken pages, even if you have an interesting 404 error page for them to look at. Nothing is more disappointing online than trying to access a page and finding it doesn’t work. Search engines will also penalise you if you have too many broken links on your site, because it inhibits navigation.
- Having images on a website is a good idea because it provides something visual and attractive for visitors to enjoy. They can be used to add colour and character to pages as well as breaking up text. It is a good idea to have alt text on each one so that readers will know what they are looking at when they hover on the image. This also provides an SEO benefit.
- Next, all of your page titles and meta descriptions should be a suitable length and provide relevant information about your website. They are a useful way to boost keyword mentions too. You should make sure every title and description is free from spelling mistakes and grammar errors.
- For several years now, people have known that the content on a website provides an SEO benefit. This information is what gets visitors to stay, browse further and take other actions such as getting in contact or making a purchase. Content should be SEO optimised, but it is also important to make sure that it is written with the readers in mind. Poorly written content purely to boost specific keywords is unlikely to provide the response you want.
- A final tip is to keep an eye on your backlinks and make sure they comply with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Good backlinks provide SEO benefits but bad ones can hinder your website. You should check them regularly and ask for bad ones to be removed. They should also be placed in your disavow file.