Search engines are where 9 in 10 online experiences begin. With Google owning 70% of search engine marketing, SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is vital to ensure that you’re directing visitors towards your website appearing within their initial search. There are different criteria that Google is looking for to decide where your website should be ranked. Here are 7 ways that you can boost your website’s SEO:

#1 Page titles and header tags

Header tags are a very useful tool for optimising your website. Make sure that the header of your page includes keywords, and is not an image. Text within an image will not have a positive effect on your SEO as Google will read it simply as an image. That’s why using text is extremely important.

#2 Keywords for other features

To boost your SEO, you will need to incorporate keywords into not just the obvious text content, but also into other areas of your site. These include alt tags for images, which are not visible, but allow Google to pick up on them when they read the image. Use keywords within page URLs, and your meta-descriptions, which will appear in Google search as “previews” to the pages on your site. All of this can be done manually.

#3 Create fresh content

Although copying and pasting may seem like an efficient way to use content across your site, it’s important not to copy and paste whole sentences or sections. Google will recognise that the content has been copied and will count it as “duplicate” content, which will negatively affect your search rankings. Instead, rewrite and re-spin all content across your site to ensure you avoid penalties.

#4 Internal linking

Whenever you reference a specific page across your site, you should create internal links to allow visitors to navigate straight to the page. This can be a hyperlink on a word, phrase or URL. Google looks favourably on internal linking as it improves the overall visitor experience.

#5 External links

External, or outbound, links are also an essential part of any SEO strategy – in fact, they actually have a huge impact on your SEO rankings. When referencing other sources on your website, such as partner companies, creating an outbound link to credible websites has a strong positive impact on your SEO. Just make sure to use the “rel=nofollow” tag, so that you reap the full benefits of using these links!

#6 Strong content

It is best practice to write blog posts or articles on a regular basis. This means producing fresh content between 500-750 words once per week, which will tell Google that you’re engaging with your site by giving your readers something unique and interesting to read. This length means that it can still be read in under 5 minutes but provides enough detail too.

#7 Analyse your site

Whether it’s through Google Analytics or a different Analytics provider, analysing your site can help you to determine where there are areas to improve your site. You’ll be able to see which pages are getting the most visitors, which pages have the longest visiting time, and what your audience are looking for. You can see the user journey and find out where you can make it easier and more user-friendly.

Taking on board all of these 7 tricks can help you to significantly improve your website’s SEO, and therefore your rankings in Google. Find out more about optimising your site by taking a look at How you can make your website more visible using Search Engine Optimisation.