|
Last updated on April 18th, 2024 at 10:41 am
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a way to increase the number of visitors you get from search engines, like Google and Bing. SEO is important because it helps bring more customers to your website — which means more revenue! That said, SEO can be overwhelming for beginners. There are so many things to consider when it comes to optimising your site with SEO. Luckily, we’ll give you a brief introduction to some of the best practices that people use on their own sites today.
Keep your blog page titles under 65 characters
When writing a blog title, it’s best to keep it short and to the point. It’s important to use your keywords in the title so that when someone searches for something related to what you’ve written about, they’ll find your article first instead of thousands of others.
You want people who are interested in what you’re writing about to find your article right away. You can do this by using keywords in your page titles and first sentence (the H1), as well as throughout the body text. Here are some tips on how:
- Try using one keyword that describes what’s going on throughout – e.g., “Editing Products in WooCommerce” rather than something more generic like “WooCommerce”. Using multiple keywords is more complicated from an SEO perspective because there are more variations in how people might search for them. This can cause confusion among different websites vying for similar spots on search results pages (SERPs).
Make sure your page title is relevant to the page content
Your page title is the single most important factor in determining whether or not your site will be indexed by the major search engines, so make sure that you are using keywords that are relevant to the content of the page. The title tag should be descriptive and contain words which people would use when searching for something similar to your website.
For example: If you were setting up a new blog about running shoes, then it would be appropriate (and helpful) to include “running shoes” in the first two words of your page title. You could also include some more descriptive terms such as “comfortable”, “lightweight”, etc.
Use a descriptive tagline for your site
Taglines are the best way to describe what your site is about, and make a lasting impression on visitors. They’re an important part of search engine optimisation because they’re often used in search engine results to help people find relevant content.
To avoid keyword stuffing, keep your tagline as short as possible without losing its meaning. If you have more information to say than can fit in one line, write a brief summary or extended description of your site instead and link that text back to the main tagline on the home page (you can do this with [rel=”canonical”]. This will tell Google that you have multiple pages containing similar information).
Avoid duplicate content
Another thing to avoid is duplicate content. Duplicate content is when you have the same text on multiple pages of your website. This also applies when you have different versions of the same page. For example, if you had two pages about the same topic but one was written in French and one was written in English, then those would be considered duplicate content because they’re essentially describing the same thing.
This can be hard to spot because it’s not obvious at first glance what is unique and what isn’t; however, it can cause some serious problems for your site’s rankings if search engines find duplicated content on your site (which they do). So how do you avoid this problem? Well…
Keep meta description tags short, but interesting
Meta description tags provide a brief description of the page content. They should be no longer than 150 characters and should be interesting to the reader, as well as relevant to the page content.
You can edit meta descriptions from within your WordPress dashboard by using a plugin such as Yoast SEO.
For SEO purposes, it’s best not to use dynamic meta descriptions (i.e., those generated by software). This is because search engines like Google prefer static versions over dynamic ones since they’re more likely sourced from humans rather than machines.
Use canonical URLs to avoid duplicating pages
You might notice that some of your pages have multiple URLs. This is because there are two ways to include a page in search engines: you can use the same URL, or you can use different URLs but specify that they all point to the same content (called “canonicalization”).
For example, let’s say you have a website with two versions of your home page: https://www.website.com/ and https://website.com/. Both versions contain exactly the same content; however, only one will be indexed by search engines as it has been set up with a canonical URL pointing back at itself as well as being linked from every other page on your site. If any of these pages were not linked together properly, then visitors would see different results when searching for keywords that should give them identical results across both versions – and this creates confusion for users!
To avoid this confusion we recommend using canonical URLs whenever possible so that search engines know which version is correct and which one should be omitted from their indexing process entirely – saving significant amounts of processing time while also reducing potential mistakes down later stages.
Use breadcrumbs on your website for better navigation
Breadcrumbs are a way to show your users where they are on your website. They’re especially useful for large sites with many pages, but they can also be helpful on smaller sites.
If you have a lot of content and want to make it easy for people to find specific products or pages, breadcrumbs can help by letting users know how far along the website they are in their search. For example, if I were searching for shirts on an eCommerce store called “T-Shirt Store” with two levels of items per category, then my first level would be labeled as “Shirts: Men’s”. The second level is labeled “Men’s T-Shirts: New Arrivals” and so on until I get to what I want at the bottom such as “Men’s T-Shirts: Stripes”.
Add a “last updated” date to blog posts or articles
To add a “last updated” date to blog posts or articles, you’ll need to add a meta tag in HTML. You can ask a web developer to help you with this, or if you want to learn how to do it yourself, here is a good tutorial:
Create an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Strategy
SEO is a long-term strategy. It’s not a quick fix. SEO isn’t just about keywords and short-term gains, but it is also not a magic bullet that will solve all of your problems with traffic overnight.
SEO is a technical process that takes time. The principles behind it are based on the factors search engines use to evaluate websites. They aren’t easily changed or manipulated by humans in any way—unlike social media algorithms where you can “buy followers” and bounce around between different platforms until you get the right mix of users following/not following/liking everything about what you say.
The algorithms used by Google have been built up over time through human interaction with their products so there are certain assumptions that have been made about how people behave when using them – these assumptions are based on experience gained through observing other users during this period which allows Google (and other search engines) to predict whether an individual user would find something useful if they searched for it given what they already know about similar queries being entered previously into their system.
Conclusion
We hope this guide has helped you get started with search engine optimisation. If you want to learn more about SEO and how it can be used, we recommend reading our other articles on the topic.