Embedded Files
Search Engine OPtimisation Techniques anyone can try
Search Engine OPtimisation Techniques anyone can try
Welcome to this page exploring different ways you can optimise a website so that it can be found by a search engine.
"Getting to the top of Google" is a common objective for a lot of web designers or content marketer. Although the phrase itself doesn't make sense; there are lots of different things you can do to optimise your website. These exercises will help Google point traffic to you rather than other sources for different keywords, queries and questions.
These exercises will focus on; 1) the better use of keywords and key phrases, 2) building your authority as a reliable source through links, 3) improving the speed and performance of your website.
SEO premium resources
SEO premium resources
Search Engine Optimisation has many aspects to make it a success, and there are many sources of authoritative information on this subject.
I have chosen 5 of the most authoritative sources that also offer a range of recognised courses and other useful resources to help you master the dark art of SEO.
Keyword Research
Keyword Research
It is important to rank for a range of keywords and keywords phrases relevant to your organisation and to update these regularly. Different articles should focus on different key-phrases; therefore you should create a list of popular keywords and phrases to focus on. Short tail keywords are likely to be more popular, but ranking for long tail keywords will likely rank you higher.
Start by entering a general keyword into Google Trends; the related topics and related queries will give you an idea of some keywords and how popular they are.
Now do the same using Answer the Public to establish a range of questions related to your keyword; these long tail keywords and questions can be used for SEO snippets or as subjects for content on your website.
Now try a couple of other tools for keyword research and construct a list of keywords that include:
Short tail keywords
Long tail keywords
Synonyms and antonyms
Relevant questions relating to the keywords
Listicles: blog content that covers a wide range of topics and keywords
Listicles: blog content that covers a wide range of topics and keywords
Have you ever noticed that whenever you ask Google a question such as "what is the best..." or "where can I find..." the results often contain search results that look likes lists such as "22 ways to improve your..." or "50 things to do in..."?
This is because people generally want to see all their options close together, to review and compare a lot of information quickly. Marketers and copywriters know this, and thus the "listicle" came into being.
Create a listicle by choose a subject, then making a list of different headings that can talk about, that include your important keywords. For each heading create a short sub-article with at least three paragraphs.
To make the listicle even better, ensure that each section includes some kind of brief summary, and where possible an image.
Passive link building; creating useful resources others can link to
Passive link building; creating useful resources others can link to
Active link building; press releases and guest blogging
Active link building; press releases and guest blogging
SEO audit overview
SEO audit overview
An SEO audit is the first step to formally analysing and optimising your website. The purpose of an audit is to check on all the different things that could impact on your websites rankings in search engines. With these results you can make recommendations of actions to do next, in these three categories:
Actions I can perform myself simply
Actions I can perform myself with a little research or support
Actions I should escalate to a developer or manager
There are are different degrees and depths to which you can perform an SEO audit. Ahrefs provides a fairly definitive overall guide of the key steps to an SEO audit.
In this tutorial we will break this into two sections. Firstly we will explore some simple auditing tools to highlight a range of simple meaningful actions that people of any ability can attempts. Then we will explore some more in depth and detailed auditing techniques; to list a range a actions to follow up with.
As a starting point; we will focus on a small number of popular or useful pages first. I recommend choosing the top 5 pages listed in Google Analytics, within the Behaviour > Site Content > Content Drilldown report.
SEO audit - Basic
SEO audit - Basic
Nibbler: One of the simplest and most user friendly website testing tools available is Nibbler. This tool checks over a range of different factors. Nibbler gives different aspects of the website a score out of ten and offers recommendations for improvements in each area. This tool is the best place to start an audit, as the improvements are often simple and permanent.
In particular this tool is useful for establishing the number of domains that link to the website, and the average number of words on each page of the website. This is important because more links to your page increases the authority of the website. and less than 300 words on a page means that Google cannot accurately index the website. The objective is to exceed 300 words per page, and ideally exceed 1000 words.
Moz Domain Analysis: Domain authority is a score developed by Moz that closely replicates Google own PageRank algorithm; and gives your website a score out of 100. This tool identifies other domains that link to your site as well as other information such as the keywords that you rank for. It is theoretically quite simple to get your score up to 20, but it gets exponentially harder after this.
The way to improve your score is to link to other domains of higher authority, and have them link back to you.
Screaming Frog: the next step is to "crawl" your own website. Tools like screaming from replicate how Google indexes a website and shows you the information search engines use to understand what your website is about.
Some simple issues to check in your audit:
404 errors; check and fix any broken hyperlinks
301 errors; this is where a website has change link but put in a redirect; although it still goes to the page which is good, there are other potential SEO issues so it is better to change the links at the source see: https://ahrefs.com/blog/301-redirects/
missing titles
missing meta descriptions/yoast snippets
missing or poor quality H1 headings that don't include important keywords
missing or poor quality H2 headings that don't include important keywords
missing or poor quality alt-tags on images that don't include important keywords
pages with less than 300 words of content.
What other useful data can you see?
SEO audit - Advanced
SEO audit - Advanced
SEOrch: This tool is similar to nibbler; however with this tool you can also specific a focus key phrase, similar to the way Yoast will with content on WordPress. Input your website and a significant focus keyphrase and SEOrch will provide a wide ranging list of recommendations for your website.
PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix: These tool are very similar and will test the performance (AKA speed) of your website across desktop and mobile versions. Both tools will suggest improvements that can be made to improve the user's overall experience of the website. This commonly includes reducing the size and impact of media files and removing unused plugins, amongst other things.
Google Search Console: This tool allows you to see how people are finding your website via Google search and can also be integrated into Google Analytics. Better yet; this gives you real current insight into the search terms real people actually use. First sort the results by clicks to see how people are currently finding your website and see which search terms seem to work well for you, so you can plan how to address the search terms that aren't ranking for you. Next sort the results by impression to see the most popular search terms that you are listed for; this should give you yet more insight into what people are searching for that could potentially lead them to you, and enable you to plan to better use these keywords. Create a list of 10 keywords or phrases that you should actively work to rank higher for.
WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool: This tool gives a visual overview of your website highlighting any accessibility features and issues to help ensure that the website is more accessible overall. Websites that are generally more accessible tend to rank higher than those that are not as they are preferred by users with disabilities such as vision impairment psychomotor control disabilities.
Optimising your Page Speed by 'Smushing' your images.
Optimising your Page Speed by 'Smushing' your images.
On WordPress you can use a plugin called Smush. Without doing anything else you can use this tools to "Smush" images in the media folder to reduce the file size; however there is a more permanent and accurate method.
Go to the Installed plugins page on WordPress, then click on the "Settings" button on Smush, then click on "Tools" in the sidebar, then turn on "Image Resize Detection". When you go to each page of your website, Smush will highlight each image that has had to be resized and a side bar should state what the correct size should be.
Site security issues in WordPress?
Site security issues in WordPress?
Recommended blogs and definitive guides for SEO
Recommended blogs and definitive guides for SEO
Alt Tags: You can take a look at the alt-tags on your images and see how you can embed keywords in them, so that people who are visually impaired can understand the content a bit better, as well as boost your SEO. See how here: https://serp.co/seo/alt-text/
On Page SEO: A really good overview of on page SEO that relates to content production, take a look at this blog from ahrefs that they regularly update to keep it fresh and on point: https://ahrefs.com/blog/on-page-seo/
Yoast SEO on Wordpress: Yoast is great tool that shows up in the editor whilst you write content on WordPress. They have collated all their definitive advice on how to optimise your website in this helpful guide here: https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo/
Keyword Research: There is a huge list of keyword research tools to find keywords for different purposes, ahrefs have listed a range of these here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/free-keyword-research-tools/
SERP features and Snippets: Search results are now much more than just a list of websites; Google also includes things like maps, videos, definitions and a range of other features to improve the experience of using the search engine; see how you can use this here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/serp-features
SEO Audit: Amongst ahrefs many useful tools, their definitive guide to an SEO Audit is particularly useful, and steps 1-10 can be a done by anyone without using premium paid tools: https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-audit/
Core Web Vitals: Google puts more emphasis on core web vitals each year. The User's Experience (UX) is increasingly important as businesses become more reliant on their websites. For more information about see: https://web.dev/vitals/
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse