What are the 3 tips to help improve your SEO?

Are you looking for tips to improve your SEO?  That’s Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short.  There are literally hundreds of things that effect the SEO performance on your website.  These things, or algorithms, are constantly being updated in the background.

However, you have a website and you’re trying to rank.  Sometimes investing in Google Ads to help your SEO isn’t always possible.  Also, paying an SEO agency or a website developer also isn’t an option.

So what are the three things that you might be able to do?

1. Name your images

It seems like quite a basic one, but is often overlooked by both the business owner and the website developer.  Think about it, if you’re using stock images or your own professional photos, are they named?  Normally the file name is something like “12345.jpeg” or similar.  However, if the photo is of you or something related to your business, then name it.  So if I’m uploading a picture of myself, I should call it “Jill-Lush.jpeg” or similar.

By naming your images, when Google is doing its daily or weekly crawl, it then understands what is on the image.  Google, or other search engines, will then know what the subject is about if you name the image.  Whereas if you leave the file name as “12345.jpeg” then Google can’t be expected to know the subject matter.  Does that make sense?

2. Key Words

Do some research into the key words or phrases that are relevant to your business.  Try to include at least one of these key words or phrases on each site page on your website.

Try to think about what your customers are searching for.  If a customer has found you on Google, then why not ask them what they searched for?!  If you don’t ask, then you may never know!  Market research goes a long way in SEO.  If you know what words or phrases your customers or potential customers are using, then you should be using them too.

There are lots of free key word websites that you can use, including Google’s very own Keyword Planner.  There are also some very good paid versions, but if you’re starting out, then try the free versions first.  I’ve always been a big fan of Neil Patel and his website Ubersuggest.  This is just one of many though.

3. Relevance

Keep your content relevant to your business.  Ensure that you keep it simple also.  Try to name the sections of your website by what they are.  The URL description of the website page should also be relevant to the topic on the page.  Again, Google and other search engines are looking at all of this and ranking customer searches by relevance.  If your website is not deemed relevant to the search being performed, then you’re not going to display as a search result.  It makes sense when you think about it!

Sometimes the relevance will link back to the use of Keywords.  If your website sells leather handbags, then make sure that you’re talking about leather handbags.  Name the images appropriately.  Name the website URLs and meta descriptions appropriately.  That way when a potential customer is searching for leather handbags, you have a better chance of your page ranking in their search results.

Conclusion

Unfortunately there are literally hundreds of factors that effect SEO.  Unless it is your full time job, it is almost impossible to be doing everything and keeping up to date with the algorithm changes.  Do what is within your control and address the simpler things.

• It is easy to name the images on your website.  Just rename them appropriately and upload them again if necessary.
• Remember the key words – use these words in the content on your website.
• Relevance is important on so many levels.  Keep the content relevant.