Here is my 6-minute SEO guide to help you tweak and upgrade your site within minutes. But remember, SEO – search engine optimisation – is an ongoing process. There are many ways to enhance your website for the search engines and this 6-minute SEO guide is just the beginning.
Say Yes! to Search Engines
Check your htaccess and robots files to ensure there is nothing in it that disallows search engines to read your website.
If you have a WordPress website, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to view and edit both these files from one screen. Just make sure you know what you are doing because these files are extremely sensitive.
To make sure search engines are aware of your website, submit your sitemap(s) to Google Search Console.
Meta Tags
Check and add (change) tags like keywords, description, expires, language, and so on as per your site’s online strategy.
While meta keyword tags are not so popular anymore, meta description tags are still much valued by search engine algorithms. So don’t miss those. It gives search engines the needed information about what your web page is about. So filling these basic meta tags will always do wonders for your SEO.
ALT Images
Spider bots sent by the search engines can not read images. So add ALT and title tags to images across your website to give them the required information.
ALT tags are a great way to let the search engine bots know what your images mean in that particular web page. And it also works as a great accessibility resource. Such accessibility features on your website can open up your audience profile as well. You never know!
Make It Easy to Read
Maybe you are blogging on the payload fairing of spacecrafts, that doesn’t mean you confuse the reader with too much technical jargon. Use simple language.
Visually speaking, keep white space within your content to relax the eyes of your readers. That means, shorter paragraphs, and absolutely NO huge blocks of text!
To make your content even more visually appealing, you can add relevant images to your web pages as well.
H1 Headings
Use h1 heading ONCE per page to help search bots understand the main focus of that particular page.
Try to use a mix of h2 and h3 for your sub-headings. This way you can break up a long piece of content into easily scannable bytes of information. Readers can consume your content quickly, and this helps bots understand your pages even better.
Length of Blog Posts
To be on the safe side, make sure there is meaningful and user-friendly content of at least 500 words in a page.
Most bloggers write 500-800 words per article. However, there can be in-depth articles of more than 1500 words, even up to 3000 words. If you decide to write such longer articles, you have to make sure you are publishing quality content that will be useful, helpful, and/or interesting to your readers.
Extra Extra Extra
Make content your first priority.
No SEO guide is complete without mentioning the importance of content on your website.
To boost your SEO with good content, make sure there is no duplicate content, and certainly no copied content. Your content should provide an enjoyable reading experience for your readers.
Of course, it always helps to write content after understanding who your audience is. Check your analytics data to understand which pieces of content resonate better with your audience, and publish more on those topics. Or better yet, spy on your competition to understand what content to publish on your website.
In Conclusion
This 6-minute SEO guide can help you tweak your website within 6 minutes. Try it for the success of your online efforts.
And remember, SEO is an ongoing process.
You can’t expect results instantly. It will take months for any results – good or bad – to show up related to the SEO work you’re doing now. You have to be patient.
Read my other articles on SEO.