Simple Things You Can Do To Boost Website Ranking

Websites are no longer created just for the purpose of having them. A website is now used primarily to get found, generate traffic, and have more of your target audience engage with you.

web_traffic_lemongrassThe number of visitors and visits a website receives can determine its success and can be generated from the following sources:

  1. Direct Navigation – typed URL in traffic, bookmarks, email links without tracking codes, etc.
  2. Referral Traffic – these are from links across the web, social media, trackable email, promotion & branding campaign links
  3. Organic Search – queries that are sent traffic from any major or minor web search engines
  4. PPC – clickthrough from pay-per-click sponsored ads that are triggered by targeted keyphrases

However, there is one thing that must be understood before traffic can be effectively driven your way and that is: SEO.

SEO_lemongrass Also known as Search Engine Optimisation, it is the process affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s results — referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results. SEO can also equate to good practice done consistently as prescribed by search engines. However, this prescription is not impossible. In fact, with a little tinkering with your site, some research, and consistency, you can deal with SEO yourself.

For a beginner, it can be a difficult concept to grasp as there are several things to understand when dealing with it. For one, SEO needs constant maintenance to adapt to search algorithms always changing. Google, the most popular search engine to date, is known to inject at least 500 changes to its search algorithm every year. That means they change how their search engine works more than once every day. Knowing this, it can be off-putting to think about how to keep track of all these changes and adjust your website for it. But there’s some pretty simple things that you can do to achieve better search rankings,

This is of course something that could put down the most seasoned and hardcore SEO “specialist” since it is literally impossible to keep track of them all and adjust your website thereafter. However, there are always a few things that stay solid and which provide traction to your rankings.

Consistently add new and relevant content to your site

Consistency builds trust and makes you credible. The more content you produce, the more search queries your content can rank for. For this, set a schedule where you can reasonably maintain producing content.

Make sure that your URLs are simple and contain the keywords for which you are optimising

Both search engines and people prefer websites to have consistent, easy-to-read URLs so they may have problems with complicated URLs. An example of a complicated URL would that of a product page from an ecommerce site:

http://www.sampleshop.co.uk/static/Browse/ID72/14418875/ c_1/1%7Ccategory_root%7CGarden+and+DIY%7C18818702/c_2/2%7 Ccat_14418702%7CBarbecues%7C14418875.htm

Be sure to make it clear, simple and descriptive like:

http://www.lemongrassmedia.co.uk/keywords-for-seo

Remove any type of duplicated content from your site

Duplicating content across domains is bad practice and can result in poor user experience. If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.

Utilise social sharing buttons on your site

Getting social referrals can boost website traffic enormously. You can place share buttons on landing pages, after a user signs up, or include it in your response email. Default social sharing buttons should include Facebook and Twitter but can also include Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. depending on which audience you are targeting with your content. Button placement should be unobtrusive and carefully aligned with your content (i.e. placing them at the bottom of your post or at the top of you footer.)

Create effective title tags that incorporate your target keywords

Title tags are part of the meta tags that appear at the top of your HTML inside the area. It tells users and search engines what your page is about.These are also part of what makes people decide whether to visit your site when it shows up in the search results. The title tag should contain important keywords to help the search engine determine what the page is about.

Sometimes Google will rewrite your title tag from your actual content so make sure you write a title tag that is page related, content descriptive, short and not bloated with keywords.

Write for your readers, not just search engines

Although it’s important to advertise your site, always remember that your content posts aren’t sales pages. They can be used to answer questions or generate interest in whatever you’re endorsing. You can even insert links to sales pages in case readers want to learn more.

Content can build you relationships. Your objective should be to build trust and credibility among your target audience.

These are just some things you can do to boost website ranking. Depending on how much you’d like to advertise yourself, you might later on develop techniques that revolve around your audience, product and content but, ultimately, improve traffic to your site.

If you want more help with website design and content why not get in touch? Contact us on 0800 690 6250 or enquiries@lemongrassmedia.co.uk

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