Increasing your Online Visibility with SEO
Understanding how search engines decide what to rank is a complex topic. Search engines are programmed to use algorithms that are designed to detect specific technical criteria. If your website meets these criteria, you have a much better chance of ranking but you need to understand what’s required.
The formula of course sounds a lot easier than the practicalities of it. For one, there is little transparency over exactly what a search engine’s algorithms are looking for and how they work. When released, they come with an announcement of what aspect they are targeting – content that responds to conversational based search for example or good quality links, but the true ins and outs remain largely a secret. This is generally to stop developers from engineering sites that game the algorithms and aren’t credible to users.
With multiple algorithms that are complex and not transparent, time is better spent on your SEO efforts than on trying to under them. That means ensuring your site adheres to Google’s Best Practices and is optimised both technically and from a content perspective. Google has a definitive list of best practices, but to find out how well optimised you are, you need to audit your website.
The SEO Site Audit
There are many digital marketing agencies that will audit your site for you, but a good place to start before you commit to anything is to use a free SEO site audit tool. This will highlight the standout issues that need to be fixed or improved upon, to ensure you are optimised for search engines.
Improving your optimisation will help you to perform better in the search engine results pages, with higher rankings. But of course this also depends on how well your competitors are doing with their SEO. Getting an audit done is the first step to ascertaining what needs to be done. Once fixed you can then see the effort level required to outperform your competitors.
The SEO audit seeks to look at a number of elements such as:
- Meta titles and descriptions
- Keywords and placement
- Headings
- txt file
- Sitemap structure
- Links, including backlinks and internal links
- Image ALT attributes
- Inline CSS
- HTML tags
- Site load speed
- HTML compression
- Page objects
- Server-side caching
- JavaScript and CSS minification
- Redirects
- Canonicalisation
- No follow tags
- Whether your site is mobile-friendly
Where there is room for improvement the audit outlines recommendations. Some of these recommendations are simple to implement whereas some will require a developer or an agency. Our advice is to find out where you stand and then decide upon the level of support you need to get you to where you want to be.
Do you have a question about your SEO? Why not give the Whitefish Marketing team a call. We have deep expertise in helping Kent-based businesses to grow their online presence.
