Doing Your Own SEO

Good SEO ensures your web pages will be one of the ones which people searching for your product or service come across first. The more compliant your website with search engine guidelines the higher the ranking,

This compliance or optimising with the guidelines is what we call Search Engine Optimisation.

One of the best (and easiest) ways to have good SEO is to have good quality, fresh, readable content uploaded regularly.

This is why having a blog is now such an important part of a business website, it allows you to keep adding fresh content without constantly changing those vital core pages you've worked so hard on.

Good basic DIY SEO is not hard, it just means adopting some very simple rules the way you write your content :

1. Length: Keep it short but not too short, Google likes long articles, people don't so aim for between 500 - 1000. If your article is  huge then break it up into separate posts.

2. Page Title: Your Page Title is the first thing people will see when your page is listed in SERPS, the title should be a concise and accurate indication of what is in the pages content, not just the working page title you use in your page editor (eg:- about us or services) .For how to do this see our article on What is a Web Page Title

3. Page Snippet : The second thing people see is the little summerised description under the page title. Google call this a snippet. Its a few words giving people more indication of what is on the page, it's powerfull tool used to get people to visit your page. If you don't write your own snippet Google will take information from the page and write it for you, which may not be telling people what you want to. To see how to write your own Snippet see our article on What Are Meta Tags.

4. Keywords: Choose what words you think people will type in to the search engine when they are looking for content like yours Include them in the page title, snippet, headings and place them naturally in your main text but don't overdo it (This is 'keyword stuffing' and search engines frown upon it). You need to keep keywords down to 2% - 3% of your text. See our article on Keyword Planning for how to do this.

5. Readability: Write normally, spiders now look for human readable text, not disjointed sentences linking keywords

6. Style: Breaking your text into headed paragraphs makes it more readable. Use headings and subheadings with correct heading tags (H1,H2 etc...) do not put a H1 tag on every paragraph heading. See our article on What are Headings for examples.

7. Links: Include links to other articles on your website (internal links) and a few links to respectable outside sources which back up your article (external links). It's easy to do and web crawlers like internal 'content to content' linking (see our article on internal links )

8. Images: Images add value, they attract the eye and break up the copy into more manageable sections. Ensure they are relevant to the topic and have a file name that describes the image (web crawlers see the file name not the image). Make the size as as small as possible without spoiling the image. For WordPress users you can use a free Image optimizer plug-in (such as Smush-it)

What you write in the image ALT tag is what will appear on the page if the image isn't loaded and it will be read by the spiders, so put your keyword in with any more info' you want to convey about the image. Use a maximum of 16 words as spiders will not read more than this

9. Share it: Once you've created your article make it easy for others to share so add social media buttons on your  pages. If they like it others will link back to it and spiders like to see good inbound links to your website.

10. Speed: When finished publish your article then enter the URL in  a speed tester to see how fast it loads, if under 2 seconds great. If it too slow the results will tell why and give suggestions on how to fix the load speed.

Following these basic rules will give your website a solid foundation. Don't just write like this for your blog, check over your main pages and make sure all your content is written  the same way.

If you're using WordPress use an SEO plug-in like YOAST, this powerful free tool will check your on page SEO, monitor keyword usage and analyse the readability of your article, it does this in an easy to use way making corrections very simple.

Squirrly is also a great tool for helping you to write good content, for up to 5 articles a month it's free. If you write more you will have to pay.