It’s safe to say that every single individual, or company, that owns a website would like to see it ranking more effectively on Google for their key search terms. Of course, it’s never that simple but, here at Jump 2 IT Media, we thought you might like to learn 5 ways to improve your SEO performance, which, over time, might see you save a fair amount of money in the long run.
So, say ‘goodbye’ to paying for those ads on Google Adwords, and say ‘hello’ to first page rankings within the organic search results.
Keep Your Website Updated: This might seem very obvious but you’d be amazed at how many companies fail to update their website on a regular basis. And, when we say ‘update your website’, we’re not talking about re-designing your site every few weeks. We’re simply stating that you should be adding fresh content onto it, such as news articles, blog articles and so on.
Google has always shown a strong preference to websites that are regularly updated, especially those that also provide high quality content, and this preference is only going to get stronger over the coming years, therefore this is something that you should be focusing on more heavily, if you don’t already do so.
So, try adding a fresh news article/blog article onto your website every week or, if time allows, even more frequently. These articles should contain a healthy mix of quality content, imagery and videos, as this will help retain users on your pages for a longer period of time, which is also something that Google would look on favourably.
Improve Keyword Density Levels: It is very well known that Google’s search algorithms are, in most cases, extremely intelligent. However, if your content fails to include a reference to a specific keyword term that you want to target from an SEO perspective then how is Google supposed to know that you would like to appear for it within their search positions? So, if you want to feature effectively within the organic rankings for a specific search term then you need to ensure that it features within your content, but be careful not to include too many references to the term as this will work against you.
For example, if your main product page includes 5 paragraphs of content then you would, ideally, want to include your main targeted search term 2-3 times within them. More than this figure would look forced, whereas less than 2-3 would have very little positive impact.
Ultimately, keyword density is a balancing act. Get it right and your organic positions could improve dramatically, especially for lesser competitive terms, whereas getting it wrong will result in your website falling even further down the organic pecking order.
Proactive Link Building: It is a common myth that the more inbound links that lead into a website the more successfully it will perform on Google. In truth, it is far more beneficial for a website to receive fewer links of a higher quality than a huge volume of links at a lower quality, whilst industry-relevancy also plays a key part in achieving success through link building.
In short, what we are saying is that gaining 100 links on pages/domains that have a high authority rating will provide your website with a far greater benefit than if you were to gain 10,000 links on low authority domains. Why? Because Google are looking for quality, not quantity. Also, if these links are coming from domains that contain a relevancy to your own then this would be even more beneficial, although, in reality, this is easier said that done.
We would recommend using various link analysis tools, such as ahrefs.com, in order to gauge what your competitors are doing from a link building perspective. You might even find a few sites that you could gain additional links on in the process.
Further to this, it is important that you don’t focus on gaining links into your Homepage, as this would look unnatural to Google. So, try mixing things up a bit and gain links into specific sub-level pages, as this would strengthen their online authority level in the process, boosting their own organic search rankings in the process.
Social, Social, Social: If you don’t keep your social media accounts up-to-date or, worse still, you don’t have a presence on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn then you are missing out making yourself visible to a huge audience.
In early 2015, it was reported that over 12 million UK users had a Twitter account, whilst it was last reported that Facebook had over 30 million UK based users. This doesn’t even cover the vast number of people who have accounts on LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and the other social media networks, which clearly highlights why your company needs to have a strong presence across as many of those networks as possible.
In addition to this, having a strong following on social media also helps to improve your website’s online authority level, which is likely to boost your organic rankings at the same time.
Increasing the number of social media shares will also help to increase your authority level, due to users sharing your content with their followers/friends via their own personal social media accounts. To achieve this, we highly recommend that you add social media share buttons onto all pages within your website. These can be gained via sites such as www.addthis.com.
You can discover how to establish your social media presence by viewing our news pages or, alternatively, speaking to our social media management team.
Unique Content Is King: As we stated earlier, Google loves qualitycontent. However, Google does not like content that is too similar to text that appears on another page within your website, or another page that features on an external website. In the past, we have come across many websites that are trying to target two different search terms on different pages by using the same content. The only difference is that the page title has been changed from. For example, one page might be titled ‘SEO’, whilst the other is titled ‘Search Engine Optimisation’, whilst the main copy of the page is indentical, other than the fact that references to ‘SEO’ have been amended to become ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and vice-versa.
The outcome? Google will dismiss the second page, as it knows that it already has indexed another URL from the same website that includes virtually identical content. However, if the ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ page contained completely unique content, and was linked in via the ‘SEO’ page, then Google would not only index both pages but it would also see the relevancy between the two, potentially helping to boost their organic performance in the process.
Of course, the key is to create high quality content that is unique to your website, so make sure that this is your aim going forward.
Please contact the Jump 2 IT Media team if you would like to hear more regarding our Search Engine Optimisation service.
