5 Ways To Help You Improve Your SEO Quickly

So here’s the thing, if you have a website and you’re not working on SEO then you’re doing it all wrong -  ouch - sorry about that truth bomb.  Not to worry though, once you’ve got through my 5 simple steps below, you will be on the right track to nailing your SEO, showing up higher on Google and having lots more brand visibility.

 So let’s get going…

1. Increase your homepage copy

Your homepage is actually the most important page on your website as Google will crawl it before it crawls any other page. That super clever thing called the algorithm uses your homepage to work out what other content you’ve got on your website, how important it is in relation to your homepage and what your website is actually about.

It’s recommended that you have at least 300 words on every page of your website if you want any chance of showing up on search engines!

Quick tip: head to your homepage right now, copy all the text and paste it into a blank word doc. Go to Tools > Word Count – are you hitting the 300-word count mark? If you are (yipeee) but try and push it a little further to get to 500 if you can. If you’re not, time to get writing and meet that 300 mark!

You are probably thinking, why has Daisy told me to increase it even if I have the recommended 300 words? Because 300 is the minimum. The more words you have the better when it comes to SEO.

2. Is your sitemap on Google?

What the heck is a sitemap?!

Your sitemap tells Google every single page you have your website and the order of importance, so Google knows how to crawl your website. It is super important to submit your sitemap to Google otherwise pages will be missed and this could harm the efforts you’re putting into all your amazing content.

How do you submit your sitemap?

First up, you need to set up your website on Google Search Console. Once you have done this, head to Sitemaps on the left hand side and submit your website. It should like the below:

Where can you find your sitemap?

If you use WordPress then I my advise would be to install the Yoast SEO plugin and follow this guide to help you get set up.

For users of Squarespace, Shopify and Wix you just need to use the url yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml to Google Search Console.

For Showit users, your URL to submit will be yourdomain.com/siteinfo.xml.

3. Images should be on every page of your website

If you have some pages on your website that don’t include images, I highly recommend changing this, like, now! It is a simple and quick way to immediately boost your SEO for those pages.

Important tip to remember make sure to properly name your image before you upload it, for example – my-seo-top-tips.jpg rather than IMG851.jpg, and also include an alt tag with each image too. Alt tags should include keywords, what the image is showing and your website. For example – ‘My SEO Top Tips | A Checklist To Nail Your Website SEO | Your Website Here.

One other thing with images, make sure they are resized to fit the page and optimised for the web!

4. Blog your heart out

I’ve written this blog for 3 reasons:

1. To get you to visit my website and get something of value from it. Perhaps in the future when you’re looking for a website designer or to improve your SEO, you’ll remember me and drop me a message. Or maybe you’ll recommend me to someone else!

2. To promote my business on Pinterest and Instagram - how did you find this blog?

3. I wanted to improve SEO on my website. I know that writing a blog is an excellent way to target new keywords on a weekly/monthly basis and let Google know that my website is regularly updated.

If you want to do any of the above points then I would highly recommend starting a blog! You don’t have to do it daily or weekly, just try a couple a month and I promise your SEO (and your blogging) will improve drastically!

Blogging is one of the best ways to increase SEO. Why? It is an amazing way to target new keywords on a weekly/monthly basis and to let Goggle know that your website is being updated regularly. Promoting your blogs on social media channels will drive traffic to your website which will boost your SEO.

5. Check your URL structure

Google uses your website’s URL to figure out what content is on that page. So your URL needs to properly communicate what content will be found when visitors access it.

What do your website URLs look like? If they’re like either of these:

yourdomain.com/my-seo-top-tips
yourdomain.com/category/brand-identity-suite

Then you’re golden and we can move on to the next tip.

If they look like any of these:

yourdomain.com/page8
yourdomain.com/too/many/forward/slashes
yourdomain.com/products/2917

Then we need to sort this out ASAP! Each website platform has a different method to change your URLs so I recommend a quick Google search to find the best way for yours.

Got any questions? Drop me an email daisy@daisycreative.org - happy to help!