5 SEO quick wins

1. Identify your keywords

Keywords are the words and phrases that searchers enter into a search engine when seeking information, products, or services. Examples of keywords are “cheap flights” or “luxury hotels”. When identifying keywords it is important that they match with what people search for. People tend to search for “cheap” and not “low-cost”, “luxury” and not “deluxe”.

As a general rule, the longer the phrase, the more specific the results returned will be from the search engine. So “luxury hotels in Hexham” is a very specific keyword phrase.

Having trouble identifying your keywords? Try the free Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool.

2. Optimise your titles

The <title> tag is one of one of the most parts of a web page for SEO. The title should contain the keyword or keywords that you are targeting, but it shouldn’t be overloaded and should remain readable. This is because the title forms the text that Google displays in its result pages. It is the text that is displayed in the browser header. It’s all very well being at number 1 in Google but if your title is spammy potential visitors may find it unappealing to click the link.

The title should be no more that 10-12 words or 60-70 characters.

3. Write unique and compelling meta descriptions

In the bad old days (i.e., pre-Google) the search engines used meta tags to determine the content of websites. But due to the easy way this can be abused this is no longer the case. Now it is the case that the main search engines will display the Meta description when searching for a URL, and increasingly it will be displayed even when keywords are not included.

So what should the Meta description display? Create a unique and compelling Meta description for each page of your site which contains the keyword that each page is targetting.

4. Correctly mark-up your HTML

The structure of websites, particularly business websites, is very similar. A typical page on a website will have a headings and subheadings, paragraphs and lists, and images. There are appropriate HTML tags for all these elements. The heading, for example, should reflect what the page is about, should contain a keyword you are targeting and be marked up with an H1 tag - e.g, <h1>Luxury Hotels in Hexham</h1>.

Google pays particular attention the H1, so it is worth spending time getting it just right. And don’t forget to add ALT text to your images. This is an ideal place to add a keyword, if it’s relevant.

5. Pay attention to internal linking

Not all pages in a website are equally important. From a search engine visibility perspective, your Services page is more important that your Privacy policy. Internal linking to your important pages can increase the relevance of these pages. Use descriptive and keyword rich text for your link text. The link text is important because it’s used by the search engines to understand what the page linked to is about. You should never use “click here” as your link text.

Do say: Find out more about our luxury hotels
Don’t say: To find out more about our luxury hotels click here.