SEO isn’t just about keywords.

The search engines take a whole host of factors into consideration when ranking your website in their results pages.

Here are five simple and effective SEO tips that will help your website rank higher.

Improve your load speed

Are you in the fast lane?

Google hates slow websites.

If your website takes too long to load, then Google won’t rank you as highly in the search results, compared to your faster-loading competitors.

But that’s not all…

A slow-loading site isn’t much fun for your visitors, either. This means you could end up with a high abandonment rate.

And yes, you guessed it – your rankings will suffer when Google gets wind of these ‘negative interactions’.

Thankfully, checking the speed of your website is a breeze.

You can use this free load-speed tool to see how your site performs. If your pages are taking longer than three seconds to load, then you have some work to do.

Firstly, check your site theme, and any plug-ins you have installed, to make sure they’re all running the latest versions.

Update the ones you need, and disable any that you don’t use.

If that’s all looking good, then double-check the images on your site to ensure that they’re all in a web-friendly format (more on this later!)

Everything looking ship-shape your end, but the speed test tells a different story?

Then there could be an issue with your host’s servers.

Check their website for any reported issues, and if it’s not just a one-off technical hitch, then maybe it’s time to shop around for a more reliable hosting provider.

Find and fix broken links

Broken outbound links don’t do your site any favours in terms of SEO.

Visitors don’t want to be sent to a 404 error page, or worse – a non-existent website.

You might not consider broken outbound links to be an issue if you’re selective in who you link out to – especially if the sites you link to are well-known and authoritative.

However, no website is perfect, and sometimes these things can slip under the radar.

Luckily, there are tools available that will weed out any dead outbound links on your site.

Deadlinkchecker is free to use and will crawl your pages for any broken links – it’ll then flag these up, allowing you to go in and fix the problem by either removing or replacing the offending items.

You can also use it to scour other websites for broken links…

And this is where the fun begins!

If you happen to discover any broken links on a relevant industry blog site, for example, then this is your chance to be super-helpful and let the webmaster of that site know about it.

Ask them if they’d like to replace that nasty, dead link – which is hurting their site – with a shiny, new one, pointing to your amazingly useful, relevant content, instead.

It’s a win-win situation.

They get notified of a dead link and are then offered the chance to replace it with a working one.

If they take you up on your helpful offer, you get a nice slice of web traffic – and the SEO benefits of a back-link – in return.

Great, right?

Choose wisely though, only approach authoritative, reputable sites – stay away from the ‘spammy’ ones.

Don’t’ be scared to ask – the worst they can do is say ‘no’.

Set up your Google Business page

Bricks and mortar? Local SEO should be a primary focus for your business.

If your business serves a local area – a shop or a restaurant, for example – then you can’t afford to neglect this crucial element.

Get yourself over to Google Business, and if you haven’t already done so, claim your company’s listing and set up your account.

Seriously, do it now!

You can then do all sorts of useful things – edit your business details, add and update your contact info, upload some nice images, view and respond to customer reviews – and loads more.

Doing this one simple thing will help you to rank higher in your local search results, giving you an edge over competitors who may have neglected to do the same!

Optimise your images

Size matters – at least when it comes to images!

Making sure all the imagery on your site is optimised to be web-friendly is extremely important, but is something that often gets overlooked – especially when publishing deadlines are tight.

Large image files can slow your site’s load speed down considerably, which, as I mentioned earlier, doesn’t exactly earn you any brownie points with Google.

So, before you hit ‘publish’, make sure you compress, resize, and format your images correctly –  using JPEGs wherever possible.

Other web-friendly formats, such as HEIC, and Google’s very own WEBP are also potential options.

However, at the time of writing (Nov 2019), not all browsers support HEIC or WEBP – but it’s well worth keeping these in mind for the near future.

There are a variety of image resizing tools out there that make this easy for you, so choose one you like and get resizing!

If you use WordPress, then there are image resizing plug-ins that will do it for you.

Lastly – make sure you take full advantage of the alt text associated with your images. Use relevant keywords and descriptive phrases in the file name, title, and caption.

This increases the likelihood of your image showing up in relevant image searches, as well as improving accessibility for people using screen readers.

Create high-quality content regularly

Are you keeping things fresh?

If you built your site a while back and haven’t updated anything since, it’s highly likely that your site isn’t reaching its full ranking potential – even if the original content is strong.

To keep the traffic flowing, you have to give visitors a reason to come back. The best way to do this is to publish fresh, high-quality content that provides value.

Content comes in many forms, so don’t get hung up on thinking that you have to churn out hundreds of pages of writing.

Quality video content is in high demand and can be a great way to get your message out there.

It has a favourable engagement rate compared to other formats – and with YouTube videos showing up in the main search results, it’s the perfect time to get yourself in front of the camera.

Also, it’s worth noting that the ability to keep visitors on the page – known as dwell time – is a potential ranking factor.

And while having embedded videos on your site won’t directly improve your rankings, the increase in dwell time possibly will.

Your visitors are more likely to hang about to read, watch, or hear what you have to say if your content is engaging, useful, and informative – so make sure it is!

Taking these simple, actionable steps will improve your chances of ranking higher in the search pages and will improve your site’s overall user experience.

*Although ‘Google’ has been mentioned throughout this post, other search engines are available!

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