SEO has exploded as a means of increasing your site’s visibility in the past ten years. What’s better is that now, you don’t need to be an expert to use it to your advantage. We’ve created a list of five things that you can do to increase your sites SEO!

SEO Tip #1: Content content content

Content is the bread-and-butter of all things SEO. Before you check anything of your list, your website must be filled with well written (readable) and powerful content. In order to write compelling content for your site, you must first understand your audience. Determine who will be reading your sites content and gear the content toward them. Utilize keywords to your advantage and try to incorporate those keywords into your content—but do not overdo it. A keyword density that is too high of a percentage is actually detrimental to your SEO endeavors. To cap things off, you should look for any page on your site to have between 1250-1500 total words—the more the merrier.

SEO Tip #2: Backlinks

Backlinks are, quite literally, pages on the web that link back to your site. They may also be referred to as “inbound links.” A good way to explain the benefit of backlinks is that they show the search engines that they are “vouching” for your site as reputable and as an overall “vote of confidence” that your site has good content worth sharing. When it comes to backlinks, it is quality over quantity. A reputable site that backlinks to yours is a huge boost and can be equated to ten non-reputable site links.

SEO Tip #3: Refine the code

Another huge part of SEO is the refinement and proper utilization of your sites code. Below is a list of things you can do to refine the code:

• Ensure that the H1 (title) tags are concise and include relevant keywords.
• Two-three keywords in the main title (with a main keyword toward the front).
• Only include keywords in H1 and H2 when they are relevant and natural (don’t include it in every H2 subheading).
• Utilize modifiers in titles and keywords ( top, best, review, 2018, guide etc.) where relevant.
• Optimize images for the crawlers using Alt-text. Ensure that the picture is adequately described in this text so that you can read it and understand what the picture is about without seeing it.

SEO Tip #4: Optimize internal links

Optimizing internal links is like providing a search engine’s algorithm with a set list of directions to navigate your site. There a number of different ways to optimize your sites internal links but firstly you should make sure to link related content together. This helps the crawlers better understand what your site may be about. Another way to optimize your internal links is to create an XML sitemap. This is essentially an outline of your site—via links— that shows the crawler all the important pages on your site. One of the best plugins for sitemaps (and SEO, as a whole) is the Yoast SEO plugin.

SEO Tip #5: Ensure URL’s are accurate and clean

Google’s Artificial Intelligence values the way your URL’s are formed more than most people think. When creating your specific page’s URL, you should keep it between three to five words total, the shorter the better, but they must be relevant. Another thing to keep in mind is utilizing keywords in the URL itself. The keyword used should reflect exactly what the page is about. In simpler terms, Google and other search engines alike need to know what the page is about from the URL itself. Don’t give these algorithms a reason to diminish your SEO off of something seemingly unimportant.