Improve your SEO for free, is this a dream? A mirage? 

No doubt you’ve heard the cliché (but inspiring) marketing quotes about content being king, but how can your content reign supreme when no one has seen it, and for that matter, any of your work or offering?

The answer is Search Engine Optimization. Good SEO will make your good content great!

Good SEO makes good content great

Let’s jump right in, as it typically takes 4-6 months to see organic traffic from SEO. 

1. Title Tags

A good place to start when optimizing your website is the title of your website pages. Yes, every page…
A title tag is what a search engine looks at to determine what your page is about and if it’s relevant to what a user is searching for. The title page is usually the main headline on your page, so it’s best practice to include a keyword or phrase into your page title that people might be searching for. Your page title or title tag also tells the search engine (and its users) what content they will find on this page, so keep it relevant!

2. Image Optimization

Image Optimization creates many advantages, from a better user experience to faster page loading times and ultimately, ranking opportunities. According to HTTP Archive, images contribute to 21% of your web page’s weight. If you’re not optimizing your images properly, you’re wasting a valuable SEO asset.

  • Make sure you’ve chosen the best file type. Hell hath no fury like an uploaded image that is the wrong size, i,e. not compressed. You can do this on photoshop or on one of the many handy apps, like tinyPNG or a plugin on WordPress. 
  • Ditch the stock images. You want your website to be authentically you, and no stock image can accurately represent your business better than, well, your business. It’s like expecting mass-made clothing to fit every body type, it’s just not going to suit everyone the same way. We prefer to stand out and be original!  
  • The name game, important from birth right through to saving files. There’s no getting around creating descriptive, keyword-rich files. Your image file name alerts google and other search engine crawlers, informing them whether your image and page are relevant to what is being searched for and finally, whether your image/page will pop up on the search results page. 

3. Alt Tags

Alt tags are, you guessed it, text alternatives to images. In the case of a browser not properly rendering your images for whatever reason, the alt text will be displayed, making it possible to “read” what image you are supposed to be looking at. The alt attribute describes the contents of the image. You know what they say about never being too prepared…

Adding the correct and appropriate alt tags to the images on your website also improves your score for better rankings in search engines.

Fun fact: The file path and file name is an actual ranking factor too. Ideally, your images should be saved in subfolders. Instead of placing all your images into one general /media/ folder, try to structure subfolders into categories, e.g. /shirts/ or /jerseys/.

The most important thing is to ensure that the image and alternative text are relevant to the page, making your images beneficial to the overall SEO of your page. 

4. Relevant Keywords

A keyword is a search term or phrase in your content that makes it possible for your website to be found on search engines.  There different types and variations of keywords. This is where the tedious work comes in and you need to do some research to find the best-suited keyword for your business, depending on your location, budget, and audience. Use a keyword planner like KW Finder or Uber Suggest to find your best-suited keywords in terms of your industry country and even budget. We like Ubersuggest, KWFinder, and Wordstream’s Free Keyword Tool.

5. Backlinks

Backlinks are valuable to your website as it’s a great way to improve your SEO.  In short, a backlink represents a vote of confidence from one site to another.  By linking this sentence to Ahrefs, (one of our favourite digital marketing tools with a very useful blog) we have now created an outbound backlink to (website name). Essentially, when more sites are referencing another site, Google sees this and acknowledges that, hmm,  this site must know what they’re talking about if so many people are referencing them, they’re a valuable resource, and then pushes the website to rank higher on search engines. 

“Search engines like Google see backlinks as votes of confidence. Generally speaking, the more votes your web pages have, the more likely they are to rank for relevant search queries.”
– Ahrefs

Get In Touch

The not-so-secret sixth step to really improve your SEO…
Chat to us on Whatsapp or fill in the contact form. Let us know what you need, and we’ll work out a tailored SEO plan for your business!