This article will explain how you can improve your on-site search engine optimisation (SEO) and give you the best possible chance of achieving the best possible search engine results.

Use your Meta tags:

Meta tags are at the top of every html document, they are read by search engines and consists of a Title, Description and Keywords.

The title tag is typically what you see as the title you click on in search engine results and is also in the blue bar at the very top of your browser, it typically includes the company name and a few of their chosen keywords. The title tag is typically the first thing someone will see in search results so make sure it is strong and compelling, you want visitors to click your title, not your competitors.

The description tag is those few lines of text you see in search engine results beneath the title, it usually contains a short description about the page/products the company offers and gives the visitor a quick overview of what’s included in your website – so it’s actually VERY important to have a creative and compelling description, you don’t want to lose your visitor to a competitor!

Keywords and the keyword tag are read by search engines, some say they aren’t as much as a powerful factor as they used to be, but they are still part of the search algorithm. The words you choose should be relevant to your business, product and location this will enable your website to be found by only those searching for what you offer/sell.

Many content management systems, such as Wordpress offer tools to make this a straightforward task.

Emphasise your most important keywords:

Your chosen keywords are the terms people will type into a search engine to find your website e.g. Web Design Birmingham. Your keywords will be included in your title tags, description tag, keyword tag, image alt tag and your main website text.

It is in your main website text that you can emphasise your most important keywords.

The first thing you can do when writing is to use your keyword to open your first paragraph and close your last paragraph where possible. This basically means your keyword needs to be at the start of your text/top of your page and also at the end of your text/bottom of your page.

The next thing you can do is to use header tags. These header tags are part of the HTML coding which can learn more about here. Simply put, they range from <h1> to <h6>, with H1 being the most important and h6 being the least important. Putting your keywords inside H1 tags will allow search engines to understand that this is an important keyword and so will emphasise the importance of that keyword and help you to rank higher in search engines for that keyword.

Your important keywords should also be made bold, this adds further emphasis on to them and so when read by search engines will improve your ranking for that keyword.

Use image alt tags:

Search engines cannot read images and so have no idea what they are or what they say, the same goes for your web site visitors who may have images turned off, they will simply be left with a blank space not knowing that should be there or what to do.

What the HTML image alt tag does is places some text instead of leaving a blank space. Now you can use your keywords in these alt tags, but it is best to be helpful and provide direction. Imagine if the image says “click here to find a web designer” and a visitor has images turned off. They will just see a link and not know why they should click it or where they will be taken to, so by adding similar text to your alt tag, It will allow those with images turned off and also search engines to see an alternative bit of text to the image. Remember to make it descriptive and if the image includes a call to action, be sure to include a text version in the alt tag.

Write a blog and keep your content fresh:

Your blog should always be informative and give valuable information to the reader, on top of this is should also be unique and not copy and pasted from anywhere else.

Copying and pasting text from the web is considered duplicate content and will harm your seo.

Blog about anything and everything relating to your service or product and post at least 1 article a day. It’s very time consuming but it will pay off in the end, remember everything you post will be indexed by search engines, so having great fresh content will improve your SEO, improve your visibility to search engines and provide great information for your readers at the same time.

To get the most out of blogs it is a good idea to write the titles of them related to a search term you think your visitor will type in to Google, let me explain.

My target customer might type in to Google “how much will a website cost me”, so I have written a blog with this title, at the same time there are variations of this I have also written blogs about such as “What is the price of a website” “what is the cost of a website”, think about the terms your target market will type into a search engine and blog about that and also the alternatives they could use.

Remember to never use duplicate content and write each blog post with fresh and unique content.

Besides your blog your homepage, service page, product pages will all have content. Search engines use something called “spider bots” that “crawl” your website to find the content. These search bots can crawl your website every day, week, month or year, its varied, but what they all do is check for fresh content on your pages each time they crawl your website. So be sure to add in a fresh line of text to your website pages every week or so and if possible keep your dates on blog posts and news items up to date.

Use a website site map:

When a spider bot crawls your website don’t make it difficult! You can create a site map which the spider can use to find all of your web pages and index them a lot more quickly, it helps the spider bots and in turn speeds things up for you.

You can create a site map at: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

You can also submit how often the spider bots should return to your website and look for fresh content!

You can then submit you sitemap to Google.com/webmasters and speed the process up even faster!

That is how you can improve your onsite / internal search engine optimisation (seo)