Optimising your site for search engines should be focused on improving usability, quality of content and making life easier for robots crawling your site (the nice robots anyway). There are a lot of technical factors involved in this process along with a number of tried and tested techniques and strategies. Nevertheless, here are five basic SEO tips that can be implemented by any website administrator.
- Redirect old pages – over time, your site will have a natural turnover of pages as products and services are updated. As these old pages are archived, be sure to record the old URL so you’re able to redirect these old pages if there’s a change to the slug. By adding a 301 redirect, you can transfer most of the page authority these older pages have earned in the past.
- Add a robots.txt file – a robots.txt file is used to help search engine robots crawl and index pages on a website. The file can be used to instruct robots to crawl or not crawl particular pages. If you haven’t checked already, make sure your robots.txt files is not set to “disallow” all pages. Here’s a cheat sheet on creating a robots.txt file.
- Write good title tags – each page on your website should have its own unique title tag. This is often referred to as the meta title and is what is displayed as the page title in SERPS. Page titles should be between 35 and 55 characters long and include the keyphrase the page is optimised for.
- Heading hierarchy – as you would do in a written document, your webpage should should follow a logical heading structure. This helps search engine robots better understand what the page is about. The structure of each page should include only a single H1 with cascading groups of other headings underneath.
- Spelling and grammar – it may seem obvious but when Google is looking for “quality content” this applies to your spelling and grammar also. Most WYSIWYG editors come with built-in spelling tools but other services (most free) will scan your website for spelling errors as well.
Good luck and let us know how you get on!