It’s always the right time to evaluate your SEO strategy and examine the best ways to improve it to ensure that your site is at the top of Google for your desired search term. It may sound complicated but, this doesn’t have to be a complicated process … yes, really!
If you’re wondering how to start fixing your SEO, here are 5 quick and simple changes you can make to your site to improve your SEO score:
Ensure your exact keyword is in a H1, H2, or H3 tag.
Header tags are important for SEO because they communicate to the search engine the topic or focus of your webpage. Search engines view header tag copy as the most important text on the page when determining what its about . This starts with your h1, being the most impactful, and works its way down in importance to h2 & h3.
By optimising your h1, h2 and h3 header tags, you can increase your site’s ranking and as a result improve your chances of being found through a search engine.
However, the content you put into these headers should include the search terms you want to rank for, not just anything. As Google crawls your site, it will pick up on your heading tags and recognise the keywords/phrases you are using as important.
Ensure your exact keyword is bolded, italicised, or underlined.
Putting your keywords in bold or italics is certainly a useful factor in terms of optimising a page for Google.
It’s more true now than ever that search engines, such as Google, attribute value to pages in the same way web users would, picking out the terms that it deems most relevant to the page. By making your keyword bold, italicised or underlined, Google reads this as an important and noteworthy word or phrase, and will be encouraged to show your page when someone searches for that specific term.
Overall, putting necessary words and phrases in bold, italics or underlined can make your pages easier to read for google.
Optimise your keyword density.
Google can be very sensitive when it comes to keyword density, and will penalise your site should you spam your pages with keywords here, there and everywhere.
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of SEO, keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether Google views a web page as relevant to a specified keyword or phrase.
Use a keyword too much, Google will penalise you, use it too little and you won’t rank for the keyword you desire. The best practice is to only use your keyword 2-4 times in every 100 words on your page. The formula to calculate your keyword density for SEO is:
(Number of times keyword used / total words on page) x 100 = Your keyword density percentage
Your keyword density level needs to be between 2-4% of the total page content to be effectively read by Google and result in the page ranking higher.
Add your exact keyword to the first 100 words.
Possibly the most simple tip of the list, ensure that your keyword or phrase is featured in the first 100 words of the page.
Google wants to ensure that the page can provide web users with what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently. The sooner the keyword is mentioned, the sooner Google can identify the focus, and as a result, will promote your page over another that may have the same keyword further down the page.
Exact keyword in an image file name & Alt Tags.
Image optimisation plays a big role in SEO and user experience of your site, and something as simple as adding a keyword to the image file name when you save the image can help.
Simply find the image you want to use on your site, save it to your computer using the exact keyword or phrase of your choice, upload the image to the site, and you’re done. To ensure your images are fully optimised for SEO, you may want to also add the same keyword to the Alt tag of the image in the back-end of the website. As you’re aware, Google is smart, and will be more inclined to recommend web pages in search rankings that have relevant images as well as text. The use of keywords in file names and Alt tags provides that relevance.
Any of these tips alone cannot ensure your pages rank highly on Google, however, should you have all of the above in place along with a good user experience, clear Call To Actions and well-optimised images, you’ll be well on your way to climbing up the search rankings.
To find out which areas of your website might need improving to aid your search rankings, try our FREE SEO Audit Tool that will highlight what’s currently working well for you, and ways to improve. Alternatively, get in touch and see how our digital specialists can help to get your business ranked highly on Google.
