Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is becoming increasingly important for businesses looking to build an online presence and there’s some simple ways to improve it.
What is SEO?
SEO is all about getting your website to appear higher up in search engines’ results, in order to increase organic traffic and enhance credibility.
There are many ways to optimise your website for search engines and it can take up a lot of time.
But how?
Google doesn’t make it explicitly clear about how it ranks websites, however it has revealed the importance of links, to and from websites, to make it more noticeable to search engines.
We highlight ways in which you can use links to improve your SEO ranking for free:
1 – Broken links
One thing that search engines don’t like to see on a website is a broken link. Ever been scrolling through a site and been redirected to a page that says ‘oops we couldn’t find that’ or ‘something went wrong’? The link which lead to this ‘404 page’ is a broken link, in simple terms a link that directs you somewhere that doesn’t exist.
Don’t fear though! There is an easy way to crawl your site for broken links, so they can be taken out or replaced with active ones. A website like Broken Link Check or Dead Link Checker can check your whole website, or a single page for broken links.
It’s also an opportunity to check other websites for broken links and draw their attention to it (you might just get a backlink to say thank you – read more below).
2 – Backlinks
These are extremely important in boosting the SEO of your website. A backlink is simple, it refers to the addition of a link on another website which actively links back to a page on your website.
You can ask partner companies to link back to you, create shareable content on your blog which other sites can link back to, or run a campaign which gets people to refer to your website.
We recently designed a campaign for Persimmon Homes which generated over 3,500 backlinks – you’ll find Persimmon at the top of Google searches.
It’s also worthwhile adding links to your press releases in case your article gets coverage online.
Use a tool like the MozBar web extension to assess the domain authority (DA) of websites linking back to you. This is a score out of 100 given to websites by search engines – the higher the score, the more credible the link!
3 – Content links
Finally we have content links, the easiest of the bunch.
When you write blog content for your website, be sure to insert some links to other websites whether it be crediting them for an image, information or just to give users a more immersive reading experience.
For example, if you were talking about beautiful summerhouses, you might link to Scotts of Thrapston.
Search engines will be more likely to highlight your website if it’s linking to other sites and they might give you a mention too (queue the backlink).
Want to find out more about how you could enhance your digital strategy? Talk to us –hello@8848agency.com