In this digital age, everyone is finding information online. Whether we are looking for restaurant recommendations or researching for a new pair of boots, the first thing we usually do is to ask Google. So it is essential that your website is prominent visible in the search engine results page when your potential target group is searching for your products and services online. This is where SEO comes in. SEO (search engine optimisation) is a collective term for all techniques to optimise your website’s visibility in a search engine’s unpaid (organic) search results. Today, I am giving you five tips to help you obtain a high search ranking with your website.

Determine the search terms your target group and audience use
It is not about for which search terms you want to be visible, but rather what terms your target group really use when searching for your product or service. It could be that they simply type in the product or service, but it is also possible that they type in a question or problem for which your offering can provide a solution. Also, do they use formal or slang language? Try to find this out and respond to this by using the same search terms as keywords in your website content. This way, your website will easier pop up in the search results.

Trade off between popular high-competition keywords and specific low-competition keywords
Once you know which terms your audience use, you need to make a selection out of them. It makes sense that we want to rank high for popular broad keywords but as the competition for them is high, it is also more difficult to achieve a higher search ranking. More specific key terms with low search volume come with lower competition. This means that you get a better chance to rank high for them. So always try to keep this in mind when trading off between the two types of keywords.

Incorporate the chosen keyword in the text
It sounds pretty straightforward to prominently include the selected keyword in the text for which you want to optimise your website’s visibility but what we often overlook are the title, meta description and alternate text for image. Make sure that they also contain the keyword. Since search engines can not read images, it is especially important to give it a description so that they can still incorporate the image information in assessing the relevance of your page to a specific key term.

Use internal linking
Try to link from one page on your website to another page within your domain. It is a good way to both provide your visitors with further reading options and allow them to navigate your website. Especially linking to previous articles that talk about a similar topic proves to increase the user experience of your website. The benefits do not stop here. Internal linking is also useful for telling Google about the relevance of the page being linked to which, in turn, helps you to improve your ranking for this specific page.

Create worth sharing material
By creating great content that other websites find worth sharing, you are generating free traffic to your website. The resulting links that you obtain also help the search engines to determine the popularity of that specific webpage and this eventually contributes to your website’s overall authority. The exact value of an external link depends of course on factors such as the trustworthiness of the linking domain.

Good luck with improving your visibility in the search engines. Do you have any experience with SEO? Or do you have any further about these practices? Feel free to share them below. I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time!

Love always,

Mee-Ling