How to improve your website to rank better on Google: the technical SEO stuff
I promise this isn’t as hard as learning a new language!
“SEO this. SEO that. Get more backlinks. Don’t forget your alt text. Make sure your keywords are embedded into your H1s and H2s. “
Hmmm all a bit jargony and overwhelming?
Let’s get this straight.
SEO is important.
I think most people know that, but like blogging, it’s the HOWs, not the WHYs that are confusing us the most.
Within small businesses, having asked many local companies round where I live, most people know that it is important to implement SEO into our websites, but the specifics of how to do it tend to trip people up.
Keywords tend to be the thing people think of first.
This is a great starting point.
If you know what keywords to use, this is going to help tons. The more you repeat your preferred keywords on your website, you’re making it unavoidably clear to Google that your webpage or blog post is all about [insert your keyword here].
So the clearer you are to Google about your content, the more likely you are to show up on the results pages for people searching for that term or topic.
And if you’re not quite sure WHY you should be considering SEO on your website, this will all make a lot more sense if you read about the rivalry between Jim and Rosy in Whistler, on my last post about what SEO is and its effects on your website vs your competition.
You need to pick your keywords depending on what you expect your ideal potential client to be using in their search engine to find businesses like yours.
You will need to know that the word or phrase you’re using is actually something people search for.
And it is important to know that the keyword you are using isn’t dominated by huge corporations that have a much bigger budget than you to make an impact in terms of visibility online.
For some top tips on HOW to do your keyword research, head over to the basic intro to blogging and have a scroll. Combining tips from this blog post and my ‘is blogging worth it?’ post, it’ll give you a damn good set-up for hitting those top spots on search results pages, saving you time and helping you reach the people you want to show up for.
But it’s not just keywords that affect your presence on the internet.
As we mentioned before, Google is looking to provide its users with the most useful information related to their query. This is coupled with their experience once your potential customer clicks onto your website.
The easier it is for people to find the info they’re looking for, you’re getting more of those coveted ‘SEO points’.
If your website is confusing or hard to use, or the info they’re looking for is hidden and not obvious, the sooner the user is going to be hitting that dreaded “backwards button”. (This is all covered in part two: “Why is the user's experience on-page of your website important for your SEO?”
It doesn’t matter if you’re using Wordpress, Squarespare, Wix or any of the other ones. These can all be done easily, and all strengthen your website.
The following things are the most important things that Google considers (or at least we think they take note of, as Google is constantly changing their algorithm).
Let’s dig in to the technical stuff.
1. Integrating keywords.
Artificial intelligence is getting scarily accurate these days. So there’s no use stuffing keywords into a webpage so it looks anything like this…
“We run yoga retreats for beginner yogis and intermediate yogis in a yoga centre in Sydney. Our yoga retreats in Sydney include yoga sessions twice a day where yogis can relax between beginner and intermediate lessons. The menu for our yoga retreats in Sydney for beginner yogis and intermediate yogis is plant-based and will give you the fuel for your yoga sessions.”
Erghh! Gross.
These clever AI bots will recognise that all your INTEGRATED keywords are stuffed into the copy and actually give you ‘bad’ or minus points.
Instead, fit them in so it reads naturally.
It isn’t just the main body of the website we can pop these keywords into. We can also put them in headers (represented in your font options as ‘H1’ , ‘H2’, ‘H3’ and so on).
Depending on what website design program you’re on, you could have from 2 to 6 different options for header settings.
When Google is just quickly scanning your website to see if you’re relevant for a particular search, it will first look at the header text before the main body of the copy on your site.
So make it super clear to Google what you content is about by getting noticed easily.
This could be in different sub-headings throughout your pages, titles to new sections of content, or even embedded quotes that you’ve made to stand out on the page.
2. How people react to you on Google.
Now the next place we can integrate keywords, in order to show Google AND our potential customers what our content is about is in the page summary (also known as a meta description).
This is the little blurb or summary or excerpt that follows the title of each webpage when you get your long list of results.
The picture below should be pretty familiar. In the search for yoga retreats in Sydney, the circled section is your meta description:
Now the second image is of a search for yoga centres in New South Wales. You’d expect there to be a big cross over in the search results, as there are probably a ton of centres in NSW that run retreats in Sydney.
But can you see the top three results are entirely different, even though the keywords have only very slightly changed?...
I hope this shows to you the importance of getting your keyword research spot-on. No need to spend loads of money on expensive programmes to do your SEO research.
It is definitely possible to rank for both “yoga centres in NSW” AND “yoga retreats in Sydney”.
Alternating your keywords and coming up with related ideas is a great way of getting higher in search engine rankings if you’ve covered a wide variety of content or want to show up for different search queries, no matter how similar or different they are.
*Top tip* Try typing your own preferred keyword into Google. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see what other terms are commonly searched for, to give you some new suggestions.
It’ll look something like this:
3. What about images?
So when we know that Google has to be able to categorise and put a value on every element of content that is on the internet, this goes for images and videos as well as. When you upload an image onto your website, Google can’t see images, so you’ll need to name it in order for Google to understand what’s in the image.
This is an effective (and sneaky) place to add a couple of keywords too.
Obviously you’ll need to actually describe what’s in the image or video, but by strategically adding common search terms (as long as they are relevant to the content on the rest of that page), that’s some good extra ‘points’ you can gain.
This is called ‘alt text’ (as it is an ‘alternative’ to the image).
4. ever clicked on a site + it takes forever to load?
I bet you probably gave-up and clicked back, or closed the tab pretty quickly. Slow loading times can screw up the user’s experience on your website.
Best practice is to ensure the images and files you’ve uploaded on your site aren’t going to make the page take forever to reveal itself: that’s usually about 500KB max.
If you’ve got some real sexy brand photos of you and your team out in the elements, sweeping panoramas, or amazing detail from your photographer’s water-housing, pop them into a programme like Tiny JPG to compress the file (making it smaller) without impacting the quality of the image.
What should you prioritise?
One other thing we can’t be sure of is how much weight Google gives to each SEO indicator: whether you get more points from people staying on your website twice as long as your competitor, or whether it’s better for you to have 3 more keywords in your copy.
These tips to get you search-engine-optimised to the max should help you get on your way:
Find keywords that people are regularly searching for but don’t have a lot of competition
Integrate keywords into the main body copy of your website, headers and titles, alt text and meta descriptions
Ensure images, files and videos aren’t slowing the loading time of your page: use online tools to compress images so they’re smaller and speed up loading times
You can take these pointers into both your main website content as well as your blog posts. So if you’re not sure what keywords to pick, you’ve got a bit more space and time to use a variety across both platforms.
The answer to all of this is actionable today. You don’t need any super high-tech stuff or expensive programmes.
Want to increase your sphere of influence with SEO?
Keep exploring the DIY Archive.
