Best Practices for SEO in Your Website

In today's digital world, having a website is crucial for businesses to reach their target audience. However, simply having a website is not enough.

To ensure that your website ranks well on search engine results pages (SERPs) and attracts organic traffic, it's essential to implement effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies.

Understanding SEO

SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to increase its visibility on search engines like Google. By incorporating SEO best practices into your website, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in search results and driving more traffic to your site.

Writing Copy with SEO in Mind

When creating content for your website, it's important to keep SEO in mind. Here are some tips to help you write text that is both user-friendly and optimized for search engines:

  1. Use Relevant Keywords: Identify relevant keywords related to your business or industry and incorporate them naturally into your content.

  2. Create High-Quality Content: Write informative, engaging, and unique content that provides value to your readers. Each page should add value to your site. Ensure that each page meets a specific informative goal with a single focus. This helps in google understanding what the page is about.

  3. Most important pages to consider having: Homepage, About Us, Contact Us, Product/Service pages

  4. Create a blog: It allows you to regularly publish fresh, keyword-rich content that can attract backlinks, target long-tail keywords, and improve internal linking. Engaging blog posts can increase user engagement, reduce bounce rates, and ultimately enhance your website's visibility and authority in search engine results.

  5. Use Internal Links: Link to other pages on your website to improve navigation and encourage visitors to explore more of your content.

  6. Word count: You want enough text to satisfy google (which means more content than your site has HTML) but not so much that users get bored or discouraged. It is important to get in that sweet spot!

  7. Unique content: Each page should have unique content – google penalizes repeated copy. Small amounts are ok but try and avoid it if possible. Bulk duplication is read as spam by google.

By following these best practices for SEO on your website, you can enhance your online presence, attract more visitors, and ultimately grow your business. Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, so make sure to regularly update and optimize your content to stay ahead of the competition.

Hiring an SEO Copywriter Specialist

While you can follow these tips to write SEO-friendly content, hiring an SEO copywriter specialist can take your website's content to the next level. An SEO copywriter understands how to create content that not only appeals to readers but also ranks well on search engines.

They will ensure that your content is optimized for relevant keywords, that the copy is compelling and resonates with the target audience and that the tone is consistent and on-brand.

Images & SEO

Although stock images are handy, they don’t give you a unique and authentic feel. Google also knows this and so having your own custom images is best for SEO. This also helps give a more authentic and genuine feel to your site. You also want to be sure that your naming the files well (not just image-01.jpg) and that we add in that alt text. Images need to be compressed for web – large images = slow site = bad SEO. Ideally small images should be around 100kb and large images around 200kb.

Ai Generated Content

Google cares that your content is made for people and doesn’t care about who has written it. If you write content with AI always double check it, use it as a base and add your own personal touch. Also be sure to run it through a plagiarism checker. But note that Google will not penalise you for this.

1-Page Website? Avoid it…

A one-page website may not be ideal for SEO because it lacks depth and content variety that search engines look for to understand the relevance and authority of a website. With limited content on a single page, there are fewer opportunities to target specific keywords, create internal links, and provide valuable information that can attract organic traffic. Additionally, a one-page site may not be as user-friendly in terms of navigation and organization, which can impact user experience and ultimately SEO performance. In essence, a more comprehensive website with multiple pages offers more opportunities to optimize for search engines and provide a better user experience.

Off-page SEO

Once your site is live there are a few things that you can do to boost your SEO.

  • Google business profile – especially essential for local SEO

  • Link building – get your URL on reputable sites, maybe be a guest on a podcast? Reach out to others that might give you a shout out

  • Citation Building – Get onto reputable online directories

  • Social media – be sure to boast about your success and include your URL on your profiles.

Pam Cheney

Graphic Designer and traveller

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