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Welcome to our 2-part series on easily improving your website’s SEO, without spending a cent!
But first, what exactly is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the practice of setting up your website to rank as high as possible on search engine results for your desired search words and phrases. Typically, website owners tend to have a strong focus on Google search results in particular, due to Google’s whopping 89.95% market share of users (as of January 2019).
For example, if you have a plumbing business, you may optimise your website to rank highly when people search for “sydney plumbing” or “emergency drain repair”, etc.
When people get started in the world of SEO, it’s not uncommon to find website owners quickly overwhelmed by the vast array of considerations and SEO jargon, which can easily overwhelm even seasoned web developers. The next course of action may be to approach an SEO agency to optimise your website for you. However, not all businesses have room in their budgets for SEO services, which can often reach well into the thousands on a monthly basis
In light of these obstacles, we’ve put together 6 easy things that anyone can do to improve their SEO rank – all without spending a single cent! Without further ado, check out the first 3 of our tips below:
Tip #1: Add a blog to your website and publish new posts on a weekly basis.
Google rewards websites that produce fresh, high quality content on a regular basis. There’s usually no easier way to achieve this than by incorporating a blog on your website. Your industry will determine how easy it will be to write high quality content for your blog, but a surefire technique is to write content that answers industry-relevant questions that people may be searching for. For example, if you’re a plumber, you might post about tips to keep your drains clear during Autumn, or the best way to unblock a toilet in an emergency.
Tip #2: Optimise your posts and pages for meta titles, descriptions, keyword density and so on.
If you use a popular CMS for your website, such as WordPress, you’ll find a huge selection of plugins available to help you optimise your website’s text content on a page by page basis. An industry-leading (and best of all free) option is Yoast SEO.
Simply install the plugin and then edit one of your posts or pages. You’ll now find a new SEO section which will guide you through improving the text content on that post or page. Rinse and repeat for all posts and pages on your website, and voila!
Tip #3: Collect backlinks from relevant websites.
Backlinks are arguably one of the most powerful factors when it comes to SEO. When a high quality website has a link on it that leads to another website, this will improve the reputation of the linked website in the eyes of search engines. It’s like putting in a good word for a friend – website style!
Collecting backlinks can take time, but is highly rewarding and worth keeping on your to-do list on a fairly permanent basis (because you can never have too many backlinks).
It can sometimes be hard to know where to start when collecting backlinks. You may for instance have trouble thinking of other websites that would be willing to publish a link to your own site. A great place to start is to find websites that compliment (but probably not compete) with your own, and offer to produce a high quality post for their blog. Within that post, you can then place a relevant link to your own website. As publishing blog posts in itself is a boost for SEO, both websites theoretically win with this arrangement. Going back to our plumber scenario, you may for example approach an electrician’s website and offer to write a post about how to DIY the plumbing for a new refrigerator with a water dispenser. This keeps the post content reasonably relevant to both websites!
By practicing these 3 tips on your website, your SEO will be sure to gain a healthy boost, all without taking a dent out of your wallet! Do you have any other tips for a free SEO boost? Let us know in the comments below! Stay tuned for the second part of the series for our next 3 free SEO tips!
That’s it from us for this week. As always, if you have any questions about this post or our shared hosting, VPS, reseller or dedicated server plans, simply call us on 1300 MY HOST (694 678) during business hours, or submit a ticket through our Support Portal and one of the crew will be in touch!
