Five Must Haves for SEO

If you haven’t heard of “crawling” you’ll need these tips to get on top of search listings.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a long-term strategy. It’s not a ‘set and forget’ tactic. You’ll need to consistently monitor the results you extract from your analytics, analyse them and then tweak your website and copy accordingly.

 1)      What’s your point of difference?

Using the power of your content, communicate a unique identity online to differentiate yourself from competitors. Describe your products and services comprehensively to guarantee the search engines “crawl” that content and are able to put it up front of searches.

2)      Mobile-optimisation

Ideally, your website should be optimised for display across multiple devices and screens so that users can easily read and navigate through it using any device, whether it be the traditional desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone or another smart device.

3) Internal Links

On an individual page, search engines need to see content in order to list pages in their keyword based indices. They also need to have access to a “crawlable” link structure, not only to allow users to click through and navigate your site, but also for Search Engine “robots” (also known as spiders) to follow and crawl your content.

Without such links, the Search Engine spiders hit a virtual “dead end” on your website and are forced to leave the site with their crawl unfinished. This prevents them from seeing the entirety of your website, potentially stopping them from showing your content on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

 4) Measurement tools

Ensure that you have some sort of analytics and tracking on your website so that you are able to see what pages are most visited and what pages are getting the most referrals from Search Engines and why. These insights will then help you tweak and change your content and layouts to better suit the users.

 5) Forget keyword stuffing

Do not spam the search engines by stuffing your content and pages with keywords for the sake of ranking. This will not help you rank. Google’s algorithms are now clever enough to recognise when a sentence or paragraph is written solely for the purposes of ranking and will be useless to a human user. These sites and pages are often penalised by Search Engines and removed from the index of results.