SEO – Not a Dirty Word
6 SEO Techniques to Help Boost Your SEO Rankings
Yes, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is hard to get your head around and if you’re really serious about it, we recommend utilising a specialist SEO service. We can help you with that.
But there ARE ways you can squeeze your current website to ensure you’re getting every last drop out of the SEO potential within it.
Below are 6 techniques that will put you ahead of the game!
1. High quality, relevant and useful content
Publishing high quality content is one of the most important factors in determining a website’s ranking; and good content means fresh, unique information that generates interest.
Providing useful and high quality content increases the time visitors stay on your website, from the time between a user clicking a search result, viewing the site and then going back to the search results (SERPS). This is also called “Dwell Time” and can affect Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) ranking.
Adding new content weekly and updating content on your pages at least once every few months encourages search engines to visit your site more often, improving the indexing of your website and rankings.
At Jack in the box we can assist with any content driven marketing strategies.
2. Web page loading speed
It goes without saying that page load speed is really important when search engines assess your website ranking.
Page speed is also very important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on spent viewing a page, affecting the dwell time. Longer load times have also been shown to negatively affect conversions.
Some ways to speed up page load are to use caching plugins, reduce the size of images, use a high-performance web server, reduce page redirects and consider using a content delivery network (CDN).
3. Image optimisation
It is important to use compressed and SEO optimised images in your website, make sure that your images are no larger than they need to be, that they are in the right file format (PNGs are generally better for graphics with fewer than 16 colours while JPEGs are generally better for photographs) and that they are compressed for the web.
There are various tools to use such as Photoshop to edit images to smaller or more appropriate sizes for the content area but there are also online image editing tools such as:
To further add relevancy to search engines you can optimise images by including keywords in the image file name, alt tag, title and description. An important thing to note that you must not stuff alt tags, with keywords, Google can penalise you for this.
4. Header title tags
Header tags refer to the HTML markup used to distinguish headings and subheadings within your content from other types of text (e.g. paragraph text). Properly formatted content is essential in providing good user experience and helps make readers spend more time reading content and coming back for more, signalling relevance to search engines.
To aid in the user experience it is good practice to only use one H1 tag per page or post, followed by a H2. Never skip a level or ignore headings entirely.
Inserting keywords in header tags is particular helpful in achieving better ranking but don’t keyword stuff header tags.
5. Outbound links
Top SEO experts believe that external links are the most important source of ranking power. External links are important for two main reasons:
Popularity
External links are a great metric for determining the popularity of a given web page. This metric is combined with relevancy metrics to determine the best results for a given search query.
Relevancy
Links provide relevancy clues that are valuable for search engines. The anchor text used in links is usually an indication of the content of the page being linked to. Usually it will be a short phrase (e.g., “best restaurants in perth”) or the URL of the website page, for example – http://www.best-restaurants-in-perth.com.au.
A way to make your website content more relevant and helpful to users, is to provide outbound links to sites of authority. An authority website is a site that is trusted, pure and simple. It is trusted by users, trusted by industry experts, other websites and by search engines.
Outbound links to sites of authority help increase the relevancy of your content and is also believed to send trust signals to Google and which helps improve search ranking.
6. Mobile optimisation
Is your website mobile-friendly? With the announcement of Google’s Mobile-First Index to come in 2018 and an increasing mobile audience, web and mobile optimisation is now more important than ever.
At Jack in the box, our websites are mobile friendly – never ‘off the shelf’ and most definitely out of the box!