7 simple SEO changes

Small changes in your SEO strategy

We all know it - we need something, a product, a service, an answer to a question, a phone number, or a whole other type of information. The first thing the average consumer will do is simply Google the answer.

Every day, Google processes more than 3.5 billion queries/searches, which confirms the importance of having a website that is visible in the organic search results. The bottom line is to have a complete search engine optimisation strategy in place that can make your business a frontrunner in Google's results.

As an outside observer of SEO, it often seems complicated and daunting, and too many technical measures to venture into SEO, but it doesn't have to be worse.

Here are seven quick and easy easy ways to make your website more visible to search engines:

1. Optimise every page of your website with great content

This is far from the most complicated item on this list, but fundamentally important for your rankings. Without good content, you'll be hard-pressed to compete for good rankings in your industry. It is inevitably an important ranking parameter for Google, which also emphasises its importance.

All your pages, especially your main lineup (home, contact, etc.), should contain well-worded, descriptive content. Ideally, this content will be optimised for specific keywords and phrases (as long as the text doesn't seem unnatural to read).

If you have pages that contain almost no content, you can use "no-index", which can be added using your robots.txt file, which means that these pages are not indexed in Google's results.

2. Write unique title tags and meta descriptions for all your pages.

Title tags are the headings of your pages in the search engine results page (SERP), while meta descriptions act as descriptive text in the form of SERP extensions. These two structures of text are used to inform Google about the content of your pages, while also dictating how your pages appear in search results.

In this way, they serve a dual purpose: they rank your pages higher AND increase CTR from the consumer in search engine results.
You can also use a web-based tool such as Siteliner or a website crawler like Screaming Frog to get an accurate assessment of each page on your website, including title tags and meta descriptions.

3. Remove all 404 errors on your website.

404 errors are annoying to the consumer and can disrupt the number of pages Google indexes from your website. This will undeniably result in degraded rankings. However, this can be avoided by creating 301 redirects on the pages that you find contain these 404 errors.

Google Search Console has a decent tool to check this.

If your site is set up in WordPress, you can download one of a number of plugins designed to automatically make 404 pages fun and useful, or automatically 301 redirect them as "crawl errors." to another page, such as your homepage.

4. Make your content easy to share.

This is a simple but effective change you can make to your website. If you haven't already done so, you should integrate it today.

If you provide good content on your blog, it's ideal for your site to have those little social media icons that encourage your users to actively share your content on social media. Social media doesn't actively contribute to better rankings according to Google, but it can make your content more visible, which increases the chance of you getting some good, natural links to your website.
The advantage of this is, as mentioned, more links and link building has recently been presented as being in top 2 above ranking parameters in Google's algorithm.

5. Optimise your images.

You probably use images when working with content marketingBut are you optimising your images effectively? It doesn't take much time to get your images perfectly optimised for search engines; all you need to do is change the title of your images and the ALT tag to include your keyword. Feel free to use the caption text box to describe the role of the image on your website.

If your image optimisation is done correctly, your image will most likely be indexed and searchable in Google image search - an indirect but valuable channel to bring the searching consumer to your website.

6. Speed up your website.

Website speed isn't a deciding factor for visibility in Google, but it definitely counts. Plus, a faster website usually leads to a better user experience, which means a higher conversion rate, among other benefits.

You can improve your reading speed by: optimising your images, using the right type of images, which can be done using a good caching plugin.
Delete unnecessary metadata and only use plugins you really need.

7. Include structured markup.

To be fair, this isn't that simple, but it's an effective (and more or less straightforward) way to get your website more visible in search engines. You've probably at some point done a search and been presented with an answer to your question that has been placed above or next to the typical results; this could be a mini calendar or a short summary of a book.

These "snippets" are called "Rich snippets".
If you want to use rich snippets, you need to use structured data tags, which mark different types of content on your website. Here you can take a look at Schema.orgwhich is the industry's most widely used for adding structured data tags.

Summarising

After reading these 7 points about optimising your seo, don't think that this is the full aspect of SEO, this is the tip of the iceberg and there are a lot of other factors when it comes to on-page SEO.

If you implement these, you shouldn't expect a significant increase overnight, but it's a good move when looking at SEO in the long run.