It is important that you regularly optimise your website. Things change and your business will evolve and so to will your website. This is why it is so important that you are looking for the best ways to ensure your website stands out from the rest.

As well as this, SEO in itself changes quite often. Some actions that were once believed to be best practice are now referred to as black hat SEO and can actually be quite damaging to your website’s ranking.

With so much regular change, it can be difficult to know where to start! But SEO doesn’t have to be scary and there are a few things that you should know when optimising your site. Once you break down each action individually you’ll realise just how easy it is to optimise your website.

Add Links

Creating a proper linking strategy is vital. You will need to think about both internal links and external links. Internal linking is easy because you can control it. Make sure that if you are writing a blog that you link to previous blogs, or that each landing page has links to other relevant landing pages.

External links, on the other hand, can be more difficult to come by because you don’t have much control over it. External links are also referred to as backlinks and this makes up a fairly sizeable portion of SEO.

Google uses your amount and quality of backlinks to determine where you sit in their rankings (among many other factors). So it is essential that you reach out to businesses that are complimentary to yours and see if they are interested in creating a backlink partnership.

Always remember that it is quality over quantity. Having 100+ backlinks from irrelevant and poor quality domains is nowhere as good as having 20 highly relevant and quality links.

Image Optimisation

When optimising your website, don’t forget about the images! These days visual content is very important as well as being highly engaging. Therefore you will need to include images on your website, no matter the type of business you operate.

Image optimisation includes:

• Ensuring the file size is not too big
• Alt text, which is essentially the title of your image and will be displayed if there is an issue with showing the image itself, so it should have a keyword
• Caption, which should also have a keyword included
• Description, this is what Google will see, not the user (they see the caption)

Content Creation & Management

Content rules the SEO land, so your website will need a whole heap of highly engaging content if you want to rank well. One of the best things you can do for your website is to create a stead flow of fresh content.

Now, this can be a difficult thing to do because some websites don’t have the resources to create new content or they don’t have the proper platform. It can be difficult to keep changing the content on a landing page, for example.

One of the best ways around this is to create a blog section on your website. It is recommended that you update your blog 2-3 times per week and your topics need to be on something that users are actually looking for the answer to.

As well as creating fresh content, you will need to manage your old content. So make sure you take a look at your older pieces of content and make sure the keywords included are still in line for what you are targeting today and add in any internal links, if appropriate.

Social Media

While there is no direct relation between social media and SEO, it is still an important aspect of digital marketing for you to focus on. Social media helps to build your brand awareness and social signals are starting to show up more and more in Google search results, like Tweets for example.

There are simply so many people on social media for you to ignore it. By using social media you are opening up your business to all these potential new customers. You would be silly not to take advantage of it.

Keywords

You keyword list should not be set in stone, you should always allow room for movement. When developing your keywords you should also look to include both short and long tail keywords.

It is important to add variety to your keyword list to cover all bases. The good thing is, there are a number online keyword tools that can help give you some sort of guidance if you are stuck.

One of the best tools is SEMRush. This tool doesn’t just cover keywords, but a lot of SEO in general. It isn’t free however, but if you are willing to put in the money, it is certainly worth it!