Today, your website is so much more than the business card of your company. It is also the place where customers find information about your company and your products or services. Increasingly, it is also the place where customers can purchase those products or services. It is the place where marketing and sales can come together. That makes it all the more important that your website is found by search engines. With these ten tips from Social Brothers you ensure that you have the SEO of your website in order.
1. Start with keyword research and repeat it regularly
Keyword research is the foundation of your website's SEO. This way you know what keywords are important for your company. So always start with keyword research and repeat this regularly. Your customers may start using different search terms to find your product, the competition may change, or you may be expanding your services yourself. All good reasons to do regular keyword research. Read here our step-by-step guide for more information.
2. Use a tool to help you
For good on-page SEO, help is not necessary, but it is easy. Programs like SEMrush or the WordPress plugin Yoast can put you on the right path. Of course you still have to do most of the work yourself, but they do indicate where your website can be improved. Think of tips to improve internal linking, tips to ensure that important keywords come back often enough and tips to expand your content. At least you don't have to figure that out yourself.
YOAST is limited to on-page SEO and is primarily a checklist that indicates what you can still improve per part of your page, such as headings, introduction and internal links. SEMrush goes further and also provides information about the technical SEO.
3. Get on-page SEO in order
The basis of SEO is making sure that search engines and your reader understand the subject of your text. Therefore, make sure that this topic is mentioned in strategic places: think of the url, the page title and the headline (H1) and the subheadings. Furthermore, the subject or keyword should also be mentioned in the introduction and several times in the text.
However, don't overdo it. SEO should not stand in the way of a pleasant reading experience. If you write a text about a certain subject, you will of course mention this subject a number of times in the text. This is more than enough to make it clear to search engines what the text is about.
4. Write a relevant text
You do not write a text for a search engine, but for your customers. It is therefore important that your website contains relevant content. For example, make sure that a text about Augmented Reality answers at least the question of the person who has used 'augmented reality' as a keyword in Google. This way you ensure a good visitor experience and this in turn increases your ranking in Google. The aim of search engines is to provide users with search results that match their question. If your website meets the needs of your customer, then that is a win-win situation. Do not connect the page, this will lead to bounces and a drop in your ranking.
5. Provide good content
A good visitor experience goes beyond relevant content. Also make sure that you present the content in a correct and smoothly flowing text. Your text is of course free of spelling and grammatical errors. Don't use too long sentences. As a rule of thumb, you can assume that no more than 25% of the sentences should be longer than 20 words. Too long and complicated sentences scare off readers. Also use active language and avoid passive sentences with the verb 'to become'. A text with too many passive sentences is not experienced as pleasant. Read more about good content here.
6. Have a user-friendly website
For a good visitor experience, the website should also be user-friendly. It must be clear which information can be found where. This is possible with a clear division in the menu. With enough internal links you can ensure a good customer journey. Google finds it very important that pages can be reached in two or three clicks from the homepage. Visitors can then easily navigate from one page to another. This also makes it easy for them to find additional information. Both the internal links and the visitor experience will be taken into account by Google in the ranking of your website. This way you have two SEO birds with one stone.
7. Show that your website has depth
Search engines want to place the results at the top that best answer the searchers question. The longer your web copy is on a particular topic, the greater the chance that your website will delve deeply into the searcher's question. For the same reason, having multimedia on your website also plays a role. Keep in mind that search engines see a website differently than people. For them, it's just text. They cannot do anything with the videos or images themselves. That is why it is wise to describe images in the alt text in five words. Google will take this into account.
8. Don't forget the meta description
It is often claimed that Google does not include the meta description itself to determine the place of your website in the search results. However, the meta description is the first thing people see about your website in the search results. As a result, the description can make or break the Click-Through-Rate (CTR). And the CTR is important for search engine optimization. Therefore, always fill in the meta description with an attractive text. Be sure to mention the keyword to convince searchers that your website can answer their question. A call-to-action to encourage people to click and continue reading is also a good idea. Again, make sure to use the keyword here. So don't say 'read more', but 'read more about web design'.
9. Start a blog
The first eight tips can be applied to any individual web page. But with one good and SEO-proof text about a topic you are usually not at the top of the search results. It is important to show that you know a lot about this subject. This is possible with a blog, on which you regularly publish about topics that are important to your field and, above all, to your customers. This way you become an authority within that subject and your position in the search results increases. For more information, read our blog about inbound marketing.
10. Take care backlinks
Our last tip is also a bit more general. Provide links to your website, the so-called backlinks† Having good and relevant content makes it attractive for other parties to include links to your website. But other people don't just do that. Engage your network and regularly share your content on social media. This way your network becomes familiar with all those good articles on your site. Google sees those backlinks as an argument to give more authority to your website.
Extra tip: Google My Business
Actually, this is independent of the SEO of your website, but we don't want to withhold this tip from you. Create an account with Google My Business or Google My Business and make sure to enter as much information as possible here. Google My Business is the information block on the right side of the search results. This block stands out and attracts people to your website. A good reason to have this in order. Read more about Google My Business.
Want to know more?
With these tips, get both the on-site and off-site SEO of your website in order. But there is also technical SEO. look at it interview with our SEO expert about this for a complete SEO optimization of your website. Also check us out complete SEO handbook for more information.
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