SEO Agency in Sydney

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the backbone of the success of any online website, especially if you own a small business or are trying to make it big as a writer or journalist of any stripe in the digital space. SEO is an invaluable tool to learn how to make the most of. But what is SEO? How does it affect your website, and if you think you’re not doing so great with it, how can you improve it?

What is SEO?

Simply put, SEO is the mechanism by which search engines such as Google or Bing use algorithms to “rank” web pages and place them near the top or bottom of any given Google or Bing search. If you type anything into your omnibox, you’re going to see a drop-down menu of searches that you can use to make your life easier by clicking on them rather than completing the typing yourself. These searches are ranked by popularity by Google’s algorithms. Websites and web pages are treated in the same manner; only they are ranked by different criteria than popularity.

Writing Quality Content

The best way to get your website up in the highest echelons of Google’s ranking system is to write frequently-updated, quality content. Good research is key. You’ll want to write things that are factually accurate. You’ll want to ensure that your writing is entertaining whilst also being articulate. Good quality content is the first step up the SEO ladder.
Create a Mobile-Friendly Platform
One of the things that you’ll need to do nowadays that you didn’t have to worry so much about, say, ten years ago, is the friendliness of your website to mobile devices. Everybody nowadays is strapped to their phone. It’s what we use to check the weather, the news, our stock interests, our friends’ photographs on social media, and indeed where we browse the web, whether that’s articles or e-commerce storefronts, it’s all done on our phones. It’s very important, therefore that your website be friendly to mobile browsing.

Increase Site Speed

Another critical element of SEO-friendly websites is how fast they are at loading and interchanging between one page and the next. If your site is slow, it won’t do well with SEO algorithms. There are a variety of tools you can use to assess your site’s speed, and if you find it’s slow, then use a Site Speed Optimiser to see where you are losing bandwidth on your site.

Optimising Images

Every time you add an image to your post, or website, you should be making that image is optimised for SEO. This can be done by adding “alt text” to the image – essentially a title that will ensure that the image pops up in SEO algorithms and allow your site’s photographic content to do the work for you, alongside it’s written content.

Improving your site’s search engine optimisation doesn’t have to be complicated or a long process. Keep it simple, and you’ll also have an effective result.

Search Engine Optimisation will get you places. It could propel you to the top of Google searches, providing that it meets the criteria of their algorithms that they use to sort through the chaff and promote the best up the search engine ladder. One important component of ‘good’ SEO practices is internal linking.

What is an Internal Link?

An internal link is one that points to another page on the same website. One example that you might use of an internal link is, say, for example, you were writing about trains, and you want to structure a sentence like so. “I previously wrote about this train here.” Where, “here” exists, you could post an internal link to the piece that you are referencing. Very successful news outlets do this all the time, multiple times throughout a news article.

Why Are They Important?

The goal is to get your reader to read another page on your site and engage further with your website. You don’t want to overdo this and put internal links in every other sentence, but do so where it makes sense within the context of the writing. Internal linking is one great way to boost your SEO ranking, providing that the written content meets all other ranking criteria.

What’s The Best Link Structure?

Three clicks. That’s the optimal link structure – there’s a little room for manoeuvre, but the ultimate number is three. That is, there should be three clicks on internal links between your homepage and the place where you want your customer or viewer to arrive at, whether that’s a listing on a marketplace of some sort, or a final article in a series on topic X. Any more than four or five clicks and people start to lose interest. Less than three, and people don’t have enough to keep them engaged – your site is lacking content, in that case. So, as a general rule of thumb, the ultimate number of internal links to arrive at the final destination is three.

Use Different Anchor Texts

Different anchor texts are as much about good writing as they are about SEO. “Anchor text” is the thing from which your link springs. Say you’re writing a piece on trains (again) and you use the phrase “changes of train engines over time”, and it links to a piece you wrote on a particular train engine last month, and then you use the same phrase “changes of train engines over time”, but this time, it links to a new type of train being built… that isn’t good writing, and that isn’t good SEO practice. If you want to get the most out of your SEO, you must use different anchor texts when linking internally and externally.

How Does It Affect Your SEO Ranking?

Google uses something called “Page Rank” to “rank” your links. This is essentially an algorithm that scans your clickable external and internal links to give them a score and help your page to either increase or decrease in Google’s SEO ranking hierarchy. Each added link gets a score, so, say that your page had three links on it, that linked internally, each link would get a 33.3 score out of 100.
Internal linking can be tricky to figure out, but once you’ve got it down, it will improve your page’s SEO performance and your writing.

Writing can be challenging at the best of times, never mind when you have to focus on so many things at once, as you do in the digital space.

You have to worry about the quality of your writing, as well as its ability to connect with and engage with anyone who reads it. It’s a tough go at times, but thankfully there is SEO content writing software to help you with at least part of the job, so all you need to do is focus on writing good content, let them worry about the rest.

What are these, and how do they help you? Here are a few of the best ones.

Keyword Revealer

This analytical software is one of the best out there for revealing your keywords – keywords are the crucial part of any SEO content’s success or failure.

Good keywords will see you drive up traffic and clicks to your site, a lack thereof will see you becoming a very small fish in an ocean in no time. Keyword Revealer scans your content for various keywords and maps it against the global scale of searches for those keywords.

Keyword Revealer also allows you to rank the difficulty of a keyword – therefore seeing it’s likeliness to rank highly by Google’s algorithms.

Social Animal

Social Animal is a software that helps you to actually write your content based on what’s popular. Social Animal analyses the popularity of your chosen keyword across the web to help you write content about that same keyword in a better way.

Social Animal will also help you to figure out what others that also use your keyword are doing right in their space and how you can improve upon that. Are they using images in their posts properly? Are there a lot of step-by-step guides for doing that thing that you’re writing about? What makes their posts widely shared and well-trafficked? Figure that out, and you’ll be on your way to creating something better.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a software that helps you to write your pieces in a better way. As the title suggests, it deals with grammar, syntax and spelling. If your sentences could be formulated in a better way, Grammarly will make suggestions. If you haven’t done a spell-check in years because you’re so used to just pumping out content, Grammarly will help you with that.

Grammarly forces you to slow down and think about the way that you write and if there’s a better way that you should be doing it. One of the things that Google’s ranking algorithms look for is proper grammar and how well content is produced in order to give it a higher ranking. Using something as simple as Grammarly could help improve your content so that it makes it to the big leagues.

Whatever your content, writing with SEO in mind can be difficult; that’s why software exists to aid you in that process. Utilise it to the fullest extent of its capability to help you reach the fullest extent of your potential.

If you’re an entrepreneur (or anyone who relies on the internet for the way that your work reaches the rest of the world), searchability is imperative. Your business relies on the ability for anyone, anywhere in the world, at any moment, to type in your name, and have your website pop up. Even if you’re not an entrepreneur or small business owner, even if you’re working for someone else, their branding, in part, relies on the ability of other people to find them online.

It’s critical that you make yourself visible online. And to do that, it’s essential that you adopt good marketing strategies that allow you to become the go-to, the first option in a Google Search, rather than some obscure 6th, or 60th page entry. Creating that for yourself means relying on good search engine optimisation, it means creating content that is SEO-friendly, and that will be easily found because it has ticked all of Google or Bing’s SEO bot’s boxes. So, how can you make yourself visible?

Be Unique & Original

One of the best things you can for your business, not just in this realm, but generally-speaking, is to create content that is unique and original. Say you’re a writer or journalist, rather than using a bunch of quotations from a CNN piece – why not surmise without quoting, or simply write your own conclusions without any quotations. Now, obviously, if you’re quoting somebody directly, you must put quotation marks in place. That’s just good journalism. But the best thing you can do for your content, whatever it is, is to make sure that it is unique and original. The bots will know, and they’ll filter out your content because of it.

Choose Your Titles Carefully

It’s really important that, when you write a post title, you don’t just do it off-the-cuff. You have to put some thought into your titles and write them purposefully. Do some research about what people are looking at that’s the same, or similar, to the topic of your post/page. Be encouraging in your title! Engage with your end-user and use keywords properly. Let’s say you’re writing a piece on, say, the American election. Writing the title “US Election Night 2020” and “Tales from the American election of 2020” – the first is succinct and will get to the point, the second is far too long, and your potential reader is less likely to click.

Optimise Your Images

If you’re going to use images in a post, you have to make sure that they too are optimised for web searches. Don’t leave the title of an image blank – use alt text and come up with something short and descriptive. Research what image sizes work best on a given platform and use those optimised sizes, and of course, only post images that you have the necessary copyrights for.

Use Keywords

The use of keywords is something that’ll propel your business or web page to the top of a search result. It’s crucial that you use them often and use them properly. If you’re not sure where to start, a Google search might help you.

Google Chrome offers many different extensions to their browser, whether you’re shopping, communicating with others, trying to focus on work, or indeed running a website, Chrome has you covered – they make your life so much easier.

Google Chrome even has extensions that help your website perform better by giving you real-time, up-to-date information on the optimisability of your website’s pages by analysing them using algorithms embedded in the extension software. So, what are some of Chrome’s most popular SEO extensions, and what do they do for you?

Hunter

Hunter is an extension that enables you to reach your target audience much faster, it performs searches for you on any website that you’re on in order to find the email addresses associated with that website. It gets you to the people that you need to get in contact with faster than scrolling through and going to “Contact” pages and all that jazz. Hunter performs this service for you in seconds. Saving you time searching and more time pitching, selling, and promoting your business.

Check My Links

Check My Links does exactly what it says in the name. It crawls through your webpages and checks the status of your hyperlinks for broken links, in other words, the links that lead to a webpage that no longer exists, for example. It also allows you to copy these links with a single click of a button. This will allow you to track which of your links are functioning properly and which need to be repaired.

Page Load Time

Have you ever been on a website and the pages are just so slow to load that you end up wearing out your patience and clicking off it, never to return? That’s actually a colossal no-no in optimising your website for searching. In order for your website to be successful with SEOs, it has to be fast. It’s a good idea to install Page Load Time and see what your website’s load time is and see what you can do to increase the speed if necessary. Slow web pages mean people won’t stay on them, and you’ll lose a potential customer.

SEOStack Keyword Tool

One of the most important things about Search Engine Optimisation is the proper use of keywords. This particular tool generates data and gives you information about your own keyword usage and those that could be used based on their relevance to your business. This tool will help you build a few key phrases or long keywords that will have you ticking all the SEO boxes in no time.

No matter what your purpose for using Search Engine Optimisation, building your website with Google Chrome just got easier with their dozens of very helpful SEO extensions. Visit the Extensions page on the Chrome Web Store and download yours today.

And if you need any further assistance or advice, feel free to get in touch with our team today to discuss. We’re SEO experts with years of experience and more than happy to assist.

If running an SEO campaign or planning content strategies is not your normal thing, the term “canonical tags” probably isn’t something you’ve heard before.
But if you’re going to become an authority online and ensure you’re using the best SEO practises, it’s crucial you do become familiar with the term and how it could affect your website.

What Are Canonical Tags?

“Canonical tags”, derived from the word “canon”, essentially meaning authoritative. Bear that definition in mind for a moment, because things will now get a little complicated (especially in enterprise SEO). Canonical tags are the things that help your SEO consultant prevent duplication for websites. Canonical tags are what tell the webmaster where to find the master copy of a webpage if there are very similar pages that exist on a particular site. The canonical tags are found in “meta-level” (advanced) web design and can be beneficial if you know how to use them and how they affect your site.

What are the Benefits of Their Use?

Once you’ve figured out how to use canonical tags as one of your SEO techniques, you need to know why they’re important to you and how they’re beneficial to your online presence. The main benefit of canonical tags is that they help to redirect the end-user to your main website page, away from a page also on the site, which is similar in its use of SEO keywords.

What is An Example of This?

Let’s say you’re a potter and you’re opening an online shop and you have an E-commerce store, like Etsy. You stock dozens of different types of cups, or bowls, and the difference between the products found on pages “Cups” (Page A) and “Bowls” (Page B) are in their appearance only. But let’s say you want to direct a search engine to Page A, over Page B, because content from Page A also appears an an internal link on the homepage of your website, which is where you’ll want to direct people to. The use of canonical tags will help the bots that Google uses to decipher which page to direct people to when they make their click.

How Do You Use Them?

You don’t have to be a coding guru to know how to use them. They’ll go right in your header code. For those using WordPress, the “header” code can be found beneath the “header” section of any given page. Simply put in the line: “rel=canonical” into the line of code. This will tell the search engine that this page is the one which you wish to refer people to, if there is a duplication of content elsewhere on your website.

Canonical tags sound like a very complicated piece of technical jargon – and they most certainly can be – but their utility to you as a web designer is almost incalculable, and once you get over the scary hurdles, you’ll be well on your way to a greater SEO performance from your site and greater organic traffic, which is exactly what you want.

You’ve probably heard the term “Yoast” around the office, or perhaps from a friend who’s building a new website for their business using WordPress and they want everyone to know about it. But what is “Yoast”? Is it right for you and your WordPress site? And, if not, what are the alternatives?

What is Yoast?

Yoast is a search engine optimisation plugin for WordPress. That is, it’s a site plugin that makes it easier for you to use search engine optimisation in your webpages. Yoast is essentially the thing that will go over the written content of your site with a fine-tooth comb and help you to optimise the pages for the web. And while it requires some set-up and initially, you’ll need to do the work of letting it go through each post and page with its SEO tools and optimising them for the web. After that, Yoast is a fire-and-forget tool; it’ll do it in the background while you work.

How Does it Work?

Yoast operates using WordPress’ own SEO algorithm. Essentially, it goes over all of the words in your posts and figures out how you might better write them to include keywords. First, it figures out what those target keywords should be, based on the URL of your post, which is usually the same as the title of the post itself. Say you’re writing about the 2020 US Election, if the word “election” is chosen as one of your keywords. Yoast SEO will ensure that it appears in your website in the right places, and that the use of synonyms for such a word, or the use of words that might fit with a word like, “election” are in place.
Yoast will first perform a diagnostic of your website and suggest changes; this can really be beneficial for beginners who don’t know the first thing about SEO. For example, changing your website’s privacy settings to allow bots to scan it for SEO keywords. It will take you through 12 steps that it uses to analyse and help you fix SEO marketing problems with your site. It will then do this automatically for you while you work every time you make a post on your site.

Is it Right For Your SEO?

The question shouldn’t be whether or not Yoast is right for you. It should be, “Why don’t you have it yet?” Maybe you’ve found an alternative that works for you, but among WordPress users (all 6+ million of them that have downloaded the plugin), Yoast is a firm favourite to help ensure your website ranks where you want it.

Why Should You Use Yoast?

Yoast should be used for the following reasons: most of its features that are beneficial to the average users online marketing needs are completely free. It’s automated, which means less legwork for you! It’s continuous – Yoast works 24/7, 365 to help keep your site optimised for the millions of times it’s scanned at any given time by search engine bots. For all SEO marketing campaigns, Yoast is the clear choice for help with search engine optimisation.

So, you’ve set up your new WordPress website! Congratulations! You’re on your way to internet stardom. WordPress is one of the most popular, if not the most popular web service hosting platform today. It’s there because of its popularity across all disciplines and people with all kinds of needs and wants from their website – whatever their business, WordPress can do it.
But it’s not just that which decides WordPress’ popularity – there’s also its search engine optimisation techniques and success among its customers who utilise them that set it apart. But what is WordPress’ SEO checklist, and how can you use it to benefit you? Here’s a definitive checklist for WordPress, to help propel your website to the top of “WordPress” search results.

Install Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an analytical software from Google that allows you to track key statistics about your website, from page visitors to link clicks and more. This will enable you to keep track of certain things like how much traffic you’re getting from search engines and how much of that is organic traffic. This number is important, as it will help your SEO rating among Google and Bing and so on. The organic clicks on your website are those that mean that a person has organically clicked on the link to your site because they found it in their Google Search.

Use On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is the place where you’ll optimise individual pages on your site by using keywords in the URLs you’ll build. Using these keywords will help your page to grow organically, if you haven’t done this yet, you may want to start over with your website. As daunting as that might seem, the importance of proper use for search-engine-optimisation will make a huge difference in the growth of traffic for your website. If you’re unsure where to start, look for an SEO tool like those from Ahref, MOZ or Adwords, and many more. A quick Google search will help.

Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

One of the factors that algorithms, like those used by Google and Bing, consider when choosing which websites to promote over others is their usability on a mobile device. This is simply because most people nowadays use their phone to search for something first online, rather than their laptop or desktop computer.

Make Sure Your Site is Fast

Slow-loading websites and slow-browsing websites aren’t only a pain in the butt for the end-user, they’re directly filtered out of search results by the algorithms used by Google, Bing and the like for they fail their usability test. One of the best ways to keep up with the crowd is to move at the speed of the crowd. There are many tools you can use to check the speed of your website, including Pingdom, Gift of Speed, and more. Again, a quick Google search will help you here.
Search Engine Optimisation is a make-or-break factor in the success of your WordPress site, make sure you’re using SEO properly and effectively to help your site grow organically.

Ah, the battle of the website builders! Wix versus WordPress… But which one is better for your business? Is one better for organic visibility? How do the two compare? What are some of the pros and cons of both? And how do they fare when it comes to search engine optimisation?

WordPress – What Is It?

WordPress has been called a “factory that makes web pages”, and that’s probably a very accurate descriptor. WordPress is a hosting service for your website, and you can make a website about just about anything, for free, so long as you’re not using the “.org” suffix, for that you’ll have to pay. For those interested in the free sites, you’ll have to put with a “.wordpress.com” suffix. Sufficient for many, but if you’re looking to get professional with your website, it is recommended that you own your own domain name.

Wix – What Is It?

Wix is one of WordPress’ direct competitors in the space of website hosting. It’s slightly younger than WordPress, having been released in 2006, as opposed to 2003, but has certainly caught fire since then. Wix is known for its universality and its ease-of-use, whereas WordPress tends to get a bit more complicated when it comes to usability, some say.

Wix is based on a “freemium” – it’s service is free. Still, it relies on you to upgrade to a more premium version to have access to more features and services, such as storage space, removal of ads, a year of free hosting, an hour of video uploading and so on. Wix performs the same basic functions as WordPress. Still, it is in the minutia where it differs.

Which is Better For You?

Wix is often seen as being the “cheaper” option. Or the “lesser-than” option, that’s probably because of its age. It has been around for a shorter period of time than WordPress and doesn’t necessarily allow you to get very technical with it, depending on the type of package you get. A blessing for some, a hindrance for others.

In terms of which service is better for you, it really depends on the type of website you’re looking to build, though both hosting services will host all kinds of websites, they offer better services for certain types of websites. Photographers who are just beginning in the space will often turn to Wix for it’s drag-and-drop ease-of-use gallery-style web page design, as opposed to bloggers and writers, who will often choose WordPress for its cleaner aesthetic.

What About SEO?

So, which is better at search engine optimisation? Studies have shown that, in terms of raw numbers, WordPress SEO’s got more organic traffic 46.1% of the time, compared to Wix’ 4.1%. The factors for this massive discrepancy are many, so the data is inconclusive and unreliable. Both do a fine job of search engine optimisation as both offer all of the things will help google ranking in terms of SEO: short URLs, mobile-friendly, connectivity to analytical software, ability to add alternative tags to images, and sitemap generation – allowing an improved user experience as visitors can easily get to a part of your website faster.

When it comes down to it, it really is about all what your personal preferences are, based on your needs and wants from hosting a website on either of these platforms.

What are Local SEO Factors?

Local SEO Factors are similar to the core SEO factors, but they differ in the sense that they focus your SEO efforts on reaching searchers in your area.

As the name implies, local SEO utilises many of the aspects of regular SEO but is focused on targeting users in a specific city or region. For instance we are an SEO company in Sydney so in order for us to compete with other Sydney SEO companies we need to use local SEO strategies to help us rank for the term ‘SEO agency Sydney’. The main purpose of a local SEO package is to reach local customers and bring them onto your website or into your physical store.

Who needs Local SEO Factors?

These are good for business users looking to amp up their local search engine visibility and improve their interaction with their potential customers and clients. It’s an important area as local digital marketing will often deliver a higher returns on investment so it’s a good idea that business growth from the local area is well covered.

As part of optimising your website to rank in local search results, most agencies in Australia will say it is important that you know what factors will affect your rankings. While there are many points to consider, below are some tools and tricks to help get you started.

Google My Business

Google My Business is a free tool designed by Google to help manage your online presence. This kind of account can be considered a combination of an online directory listing and a social media profile.

Similar to an online directory, you are able to claim ownership of your business and location through Google My Business and populate it with important information such as location details, business hours and any other information you want to add. This listing also allows your customers to leave reviews on your business and services.

As part of a Google My Business account, you can add pictures and updates to your listing, similar to how you would post updates on Facebook. This platform also gives other content creators the chance to upload pictures of your business or photos of your products or services for others to see. In a world so deeply ingrained with social media advertising, this is the perfect way to bring your customers closer to you and maximise your business visibility.

Why do you need Google My Business?

Google My Business enables your business to show up in Google Search and Maps. Implementing this digital marketing strategy helps build instant credibility with potential customers that interact with your listing and generally will be a great lead generation source.

Use the insights tool to learn about how your business is being found and what your target consumers are looking for.

Share important details about your business, help users learn about your brand, and take advantage of being able to directly communicate with potential customers.

Name Address Phone Number (NAP)

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone Number. Ensuring these three points are consistent across the web is important for any brand that wants to rank well in local search results. It also helps add strength to your brand.

How to improve your NAP ranking

Make Sure Your NAP Is Consistent Across the Internet: Your business NAP should be correct on your website and any other web listings. This helps show Google that you are a legitimate business.

Maintain your Social Media Channels: Ensure your NAP is correct on any social media channels that you use. This helps add authority to your business to help rankings.

Use a Local Phone Number: Help your local rankings by making sure you use a local phone number.

Develop a Strategy: Sit down and come up with a strategy to improve your local SEO. Part of this should include checking and updating your NAP on all web listings.

Utilising these couple of tricks should help set you on the right path to local SEO success. Local SEO practices can be tricky to grasp. Contact us today to learn more about how you can improve your local SEO results.

E-commerce SEO is the use of various strategies to improve your search rankings for your website and product pages. Strategies for e-Commerce SEO include on-page optimisation, link building and competitor analysis.

A digital marketing agency will use this form of SEO is to generate more organic traffic and sales for your business. In e-Commerce specifically, it’s simply doing the same thing (focusing on organic visits) with the following goals:

Driving more traffic to your product pages and online store via this unique form of branding. Building organic sales that you don’t have to spend ad money to get.

Creating better organic brand awareness on keywords/products, which it does by increasing your visibility.

How do you improve your eCommerce SEO Services?

The appearance of your website goes a long way in attracting customers. So here are some basic tips on improving your site structure and layout.

Plan your site structure before development: Planning a site structure before you build your website is very important. This will decide the order in which users click through your web pages. This will also become your navigation and URL structure.

Create a URL structure that follows your hierarchy: The second main element in improving your eCommerce SEO is your URL structure. If you’ve logically thought through your hierarchy, this should not be too difficult. Your URL structure follows your hierarchy.

Create your site navigation in HTML or CSS: When you create your navigation, keep the coding simple. HTML and CSS are your safest approach. Coding on other platforms will limit the crawler’s ability to cover your site’s well-thought-out navigation.

Create a header that lists your main navigation pages: Your top header should only list your main pages. Anything extra can become distracting and confusing for the user.

Keyword research is important

Keyword research is a very important part of finding and analysing search terms that users are actually searching for. This is extremely important to anyone running an eCommerce store.

There are various tools to help you achieve this, one of them being Google Analytics. Besides this, there are other ways to optimise your keyword use.

• Brainstorm a list of relevant topics based on your business.
• Fill in those topics with keywords.
• Research related search terms.
• Check for a mix of short keywords and long-tail keywords.
• Check to see how your competitors are ranking for your top keywords.
• Use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to cull your list and highlight the most important keywords for your business.

On-Page Optimisation

On-Site SEO optimisation (also known as on-page SEO optimisation) involves the process of optimising each and every webpage on your site in order to rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Various factors help increase traffic to your site and maximise your visibility to major search engines, some of these features include:

• Pay attention to the quality of your site content.
• Don’t forget the importance of URL optimisation.
• Improve your user interaction.

Reviewing your websites structure, content and product information will help to put you on the path to improving your eCommerce SEO.

Want to know more about creating an awesome online eCommerce store? Give us a call!

Search Engine Optimisation in it’s most basic form can be said to be a form of advertising. It is the process of getting traffic from the organic search results (non-paid for ads) on search engines. Its how search engines determine what content is most relevant to you based on the keywords you search.

What About On-Site SEO Factors?

On-Site SEO optimisation (also known as on-page SEO optimisation) involves the process of optimising each and every webpage on your site in order to rank higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

So what exactly are the factors that help increase traffic to your site and maximize your visibility to major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo? Let’s break down the most basic components involved in On-Site SEO optimisation.

Content…Content…Content

We can’t stress the importance of this enough, no matter how many keywords you cram into an article (keyword spamming will get you penalised anyway) if it isn’t user-oriented and filled with the necessary information it won’t get traffic. Don’t forget that quality drives demand. People don’t want empty, keyword filled pages. They want relevant, linkable information. Provide your visitors with a wide array of quality information and rest assured they’ll come back for more. Don’t forget, content should be:

• original
• relevant
• up-to-date
• simply and easy to understand
• well researched

URL Optimisation

A URL is a permanent link that is unique to each webpage. Optimising your URLs is very important for full SEO optimisation and website visibility. A good URL should be less than 255 characters and hyphens should be used to separate each individual part. A good URL should possess several key features, it must be:

• short and concise
• descriptive
• contain the most relevant info or keywords

Good URLs should mimic the actual structure of a website, it should:

• • Be arranged into categories; group pages into categories to help users and search engines find what they want quickly.
  • Add a Breadcrumb menu; this is helpful because it allows users to navigate your website in a structured way since they always know where they are and how far from the home page.

User Interaction

These days everyone has at least one mobile device that they use to search. For this reason, you want to make sure that your website is optimised for mobile.

Lower your bounce rate, this is perhaps one of the most overlooked parts of SEO. The bounce rate is the number of visitors to any given website who navigate off of the site after viewing only one page. There are a few basic ways to lower your bounce rate:

• • • Improve the quality of your content
    • Avoid pop-ups
    • Target keywords that attract traffic
    • Improve the aesthetic appeal of your homepage
    • Create a compelling call-to-action.

Improve the time spent on your site by improving website design. Most people look at the general layout of a website before even checking the content, ensure you’re also focused on conversion rate optimisation and use high quality and eye-catching images, get a neat web layout and enticing content.

Give us a call today to learn more about SEO and how it can help improve your website.

You have to walk before you run, so before you get down into the nitty-gritty of on-page SEO optimisation, you need to learn some basic off-page maintenance and technical checks. These allow you to ensure full visibility, crawlability, user-friendliness, functionality, ranking, and many other important website features.

Site Speed

Also referred to as page speed, which can be described as either the “page load time” (time taken to fully display the contents of a particular page) or “time to first byte” (how long it takes your browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server). Slow loading websites often see a high bounce rate as many users will leave a website that takes too long to load.

Below are a few simple ways to increase your site speed;

• Reduce redirects, this lessens delays caused by the request-response cycle.
• Enable compression, use Gzip to reduce your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript that are larger than 150 bytes (but not on images).
• Optimise images, use programs like Photoshop to compress images while keeping them high quality.
• Remove render-blocking JavaScript.
• Leverage browser caching.
• Use a content distribution network.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

SSL is a software installed on your web browser to encrypt (convert data to a non-readable form) your website’s data transmitted over the Internet. It functions as security against cyber attacks and other forms of malware. Now the link between SSL and SEO comes from the angle of encouraging user safety, websites with SSL certificates perform better on SEO parameters.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is when content appears on the Internet in more than one place. If the same content appears on more than one URL then it’s considered duplicate content. So how exactly do you deal with duplicate content?

• Use a 301 redirect
• Use the rel=canonical attribute
• Try Meta Robots Noindex
• Preferred domain and parameter handling in Google Search Console
• Maintain consistency when linking internally throughout a website
• Add a self-referential rel=canonical link to your existing pages

Sitemap

A sitemap enables Google and other search engines to easily navigate your site, as it provides users with a map of your site’s content. This can heavily improve your rankings as long as your site is well arranged and easy for users to navigate and use.

Mobile Friendly

One thing you have to keep in mind is that 60% of searches come from mobile devices, so it’s highly important to make sure your website is mobile friendly. So how exactly do you make your website more mobile friendly?

• Make your website responsive to different devices; this means that the website displays the same content and information on any device you access it on regardless of device size
• Make information easier to locate. With so many users choosing mobile devices you want to make sure your information is clear and easy to find.
• Turn on autocorrect for forms, this improves user experience and makes navigation and input much quicker.
• Use large button sizes
• Use large font sizes
• Compress your images and CSS
• Allow an easy way to switch to desktop view

Think your website could do with a technical SEO audit? We can help. Give us a call today!

If you are starting out or looking for ways to improve your websites SEO (search engine optimization) it can be hard to know where to start. Our  account management team have put our heads together to come up with the top SEO tools that you need to improve your google ranking. These tools will help to ensure that you are maximising your SEO efforts in order to rank highly in the search results.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a fantastic SEO tool and one that should be used regularly. SEMrush will be able to help you:

• Perform keyword research
• Track your keywords
• Track competitors keywords
• Run an SEO audit
• Find backlink opportunities

Use Ahrefs

Most users know this as the “backlink checker”, but this is a gross understatement of the full capabilities of this SEO tool. There are many cool and useful features found in this tool, which includes but is not limited to;

• URL Rating: Ahref measures the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing towards a given URL, link quality and quantity correlate with higher rankings in search engines.
• Domain Rating: This is basically like URL rating, but it points towards all the URLs in the entire domain. Link quality and quantity correlate with higher rankings for all the URLs on a domain in search engines.
• Ahrefs Rank: Ahrefs ranking of a domain’s ranking relative to all other domains on the Internet.
• Backlinks: The number of hyperlinks pointing towards a particular URL.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google which tracks and reports website traffic. It provides statistics and basic analytical tools for SEO and marketing purposes. Our team will testify this is a must have for SEO reporting.

• Google Analytics performs various key features, which include but are not limited to;
• Google Analytics determines new vs old returning users, allowing you to determine the number of new unique visitors to the site.
• Google Analytics categorises the user’s level of engagement within the site into sessions. A session is a group of user hits that take place within a given time frame
• Analytics joins the data collected by the tracking code with other sources like measurement protocol or other Google marketing tools like Google Ads, AdSense, and Search Console.
• Also, it further categorises and organises the data for filters, goals, data grouping, custom metrics and more depending on the user preferences.

SEO Search Console

This is a free web service provided by Google which allows you to check your indexing status and optimise the visibility of your website for organic visibility. So what services does Search Console provide?

• Clicks: The amount of clicks tells you how often people clicked on your website in the search results of Google. This number tells you about the performance of your page titles and meta descriptions.
• Average CTR: The CTR – Click-Through Rate – tells you what percentage of the people that have seen your website in the search results also clicked through to your website.
• Impressions: The impressions tell you how often your website or specific page is shown in the search results.
• Average position: This tells you what the average ranking of a specific keyword or page was in the time period you’ve selected.

Want to learn more about SEO tools? Call us today to speak to an SEO expert!

SEO is an acronym that gets thrown around a lot online by professionals in the web space, YouTubers and bloggers alike will tell you endlessly that it’s all about keywords and SEO. But what is SEO, and how does it help your website grow? What do you need to do to maximise its effectiveness? All of these are questions that you, as a beginner in the blogging or website space may have. Here, we have some of the answers to some of those burning questions.

What Is ‘SEO’?

Our first duty is to inform you about what SEO is. ‘SEO’ is an acronym that stands for “search engine optimisation”. This is a process that search engines use, through algorithms written into the coding of the search engine, to (in simple terms) increase the visibility of your website by using a series of keywords that enable your, or any, website to show up more frequently/nearer the top of a Google or Bing search.

The process of search engine optimisation is performed by bots, billions of times every day as they trawl through the billions of websites registered on the internet. Each search made by a search engine like Bing or Google, aims to find the best results that match that search, based on the keywords in that search.

How does it work?

You may have heard about the importance of Search Engine Optimisation for your business. And while that is true, you have to first understand why it is important for your business. To do that, you’ll have to know how it works and why it works for you. Let’s say that you have your own blog about politics and current affairs – whatever it’s called, “The Politics and Current Affairs Blog”, for instance. Let’s say that you want to become one of the top authoritative figures on politics and current affairs – in order to do that you’re going to need to do a few things really well to trigger Google or Bing bots to send your content to the top of the pile, or at least, anywhere near it.

What Do You Need To Do To Make It Work For You?

To see real results the first thing you’ll have to do is post often and post well. Meaning that you’ll need to be factually accurate, clear and concise in the information you bring to the table and you’ll need to utilise keywords when posting a blog post – these keywords can be whatever you like, but those keywords are going to drive your page towards the top of people’s search engine results. The keywords are then filtered by Google or another search engine’s bots using things like timeliness and hyperlinks to reputable sources, and accuracy of the information presented.

How Can You Grow with SEO?

Your website’s growth doesn’t entirely depend on SEO, but utilising Search Engine Optimisation algorithms takes lots of time and practice and learning about your audience that you want to reach. What keywords are they using when they perform a Google search? How can you be one of the pages that come up on the first page of their search? Something you can’t do is lag behind. You need to be prompt and purposeful with your posts. You don’t become an authority on anything online without hard work coming first. Post often and post well.