What’s the first step in getting traffic? Setting up your website for search engine optimization. This does not imply that you should change your website (yet!). We’ll start with some of the tools available, many of which are free or accessible directly from the search engines. We can use these to look at what’s going on right now and obtain info on what we should do next.
Even seasoned experts find it difficult to determine which tools to use and in which situations when it comes to SEO as a discipline. The tools listed below, on the other hand, are vital in every campaign, whether it’s your first or 1000th site.
1. Setup Google Analytics (GA) to track website traffic:
Installing analytics software is the one SEO technique you must try if you do nothing else. Google Analytics is a free, versatile, and powerful tool that allows you to measure how many people visit your website and what they do while there.
It can measure purchases, what material your audience is most interested in, and how they find you. It takes a little technical know-how to get started with Google Analytics, but if you’re using one of the most popular content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress, there are lots of tools and in-depth guidance to help you get started.
Although Google Analytics is a large topic that needs its own guide, we recommend starting here and checking out this small company guide, which has a number of useful articles.
2. Setup Google Search Console (GSC) to see what Google makes of your site:
What if I told you that Google has a strong set of tools that can tell you how often they crawl your site, what they believe it’s about, and even give you ideas for problems they’re having? And you’re allowed to have it? Is it really for free? Wouldn’t you like to have it?
You certainly can – Google Search Console is a free tool that allows you to track and improve your site’s performance in search results. This is basically free advise from the people we’re attempting to impress.
It’s easy to get started. By adding a meta tag to your homepage’s HTML code, uploading a file to a server, or using Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager, you may prove that you are the site’s owner or administrator.
Give it a few days to gather data, and you’ll have a slew of possibilities. Use Search Console to verify Google understands your content, check which searches drive traffic (as well as how often people click on your site in the search results), track spam concerns, and discover who is connecting to you, among other things. Search Console is sometimes neglected, yet it may make a significant difference.
3. Use Bing Webmaster Tools to get even more information:
Google is by far the most dominating participant in the Singapore search engine industry. Every day, though, millions of queries are conducted using Microsoft’s search engine.
Another method to boost your SEO efforts is to learn what people think of your site. They, like Google, offer a fantastic tool called Bing Webmaster Tools that provides free information.
You might receive different recommendations on how to optimise your website because it provides different data to Search Console. It also includes SEO reports and an SEO Analyzer to help you get started with practical advice. There are several ways to validate your site in order to register and get started, similar to Search Console.
Want to learn more?
- How to get your website on Google
- How to get your website ranking in Google
- How to create custom dashboards in Google Analytics (to save you time by putting all your favourite metrics in one place)
- An instant SEO diagnosis using Google Analytics
- Using Search Console to find improvements you can make in only 3 minutes
- WooRank SEO Checker
How do you research keywords?
Keyword research is one aspect of SEO that many people are familiar with. After all, we use a keyword every time we use a search engine (the name is a misnomer; most keywords contain many words!)
Many SEO efforts begin with keywords; understanding what your niche’s audience is looking for is a significant benefit. During this time, we’ll utilise tools to look up genuine terms that people put into search engines. You’ll reach your audience by speaking their language, not technical jargon, just like you would in the offline world.
You may utilise your keyword suggestions for on-page SEO, enhancing your content, creating useful pages, and discovering related sites in your niche once you’ve compiled a list of them.
1. Give your website a home for all topics:
Let’s start with a practical example: consider all of the essential topics covered on our website. Don’t try to think of every possible keyword variant; instead, organise your thoughts into subject buckets, each of which should cover a single page or a group of pages that are closely linked.
If you blog, you’ll have a bucket for each of the key topics you write about, such as cake recipes or Birmingham restaurants. You’ll need a bucket for each product or service you sell if you have a company website.
Make a list of keywords out of these subjects. Consider all of the many ways someone may look for each issue separately. What keywords would you want to see our site rank for? Put yourself in your audience’s shoes: what terms would they use to locate your content?
If nothing else, ensuring that your key subjects have a proper home demonstrates that you are considering how people will discover your product, service, or information.
2. See what keywords your site is visible for:
A good approach to obtain ideas for new keywords is to look at what you already rank for. These are the subjects for which Google or Bing already believe you are a relevant resource – this can indicate that they haven’t found you yet, some topics that will surprise you, or areas where your site has made progress.
You can receive a glimpse of the terms your site is visible for by using third-party tools like SEMrush or Serpstat (both of which provide a variety of free reports). You may not yet be high enough in these rankings to gain traffic, but you have to start somewhere!
3. See which keywords send traffic to your site:
You may now obtain some free keyword ideas if you’ve set up Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
Both tools display the precise search keywords for which your site has been displayed, as well as the number of individuals who have clicked on your result.
For example, Search Analytics data shows which searches you’ve shown up for, your page’s typical ranking position, and how many people have clicked on your result.
4. Expand your keyword targets with related searches:
Using the data Google provides for each search is a wonderful and free method to come up with new keyword ideas in your area. You’ll discover Related Searches at the bottom of any Google search once you’ve completed it. Is there anything you might utilise to better your content?
Similarly, we may draw a lot of inspiration from Google’s Suggest feature (the list of ideas Google shows when you start typing in the search bar). These phrases appear because they are commonly used by Google.
Enter your seed term into tools like Keyword Tool and Ubersuggest, and you’ll get a lot of variations based on real searches.
Even better, some of these programmes allow you to perform the same thing for YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia, and other sites to receive results for different search categories like video or retail searches.
5. Check out your competitors:
Another fast and effective SEO strategy is to look at what keywords your rivals are ranking for. Enter a rival domain into one of the tools we use to verify our own rankings. You’ll be able to rapidly discover what phrases are driving traffic to their site, and you can pick the best for yourself!
If you don’t know who your competitors are, check up some of your most critical keyword goals and look at the sites that frequently rank highly.
If you don’t enjoy sifting through mountains of data, don’t put in a big website like Amazon that sells a lot of stuff. Choose someone who is large enough to have a large number of keywords yet small enough to specialise.
Now, just because a rival ranks well for a term doesn’t imply you should strive to rank for it as well. It must be extremely relevant to your website and target audience. However, this is a simple and effective approach to identify audience interests by utilising the hard work of others.
6. Choose suitable keyword targets:
At some point, you’ll have a long list of possible keywords. We need to figure out how to choose the best ones to focus on. We want a combination of head and long-tail keywords in this.
Head terms are more commonly searched, contain fewer words (3 or less in most situations), and are hence more general and competitive. Long-tail terms are more specialised and include longer phrases (usually over three syllables). While long-tail keywords are less common, we can generally identify what the searcher is looking for. Consider men’s brown chelsea boots versus shoes.
We may get keyword volume statistics using a variety of tools, including Google’s Keyword Planner (which requires an active AdWords account to fully utilise), SEMrush (both paid and free alternatives), and WordStream (paid and free options).
Use these to eliminate keyword ideas with insufficient, or even excessive, volume, create a good balance of head and long-tail goals, research the competition, and even come up with new ones.
Want to learn more?
- An introductory guide to keyword research
- Keyword research for e-commerce websites
- Google Trends – a tool to show keyword popularity over time
- Is your keyword strategy affecting your search engine rankings?
- Are keywords still important for SEO?
Looking for more? You can read on or watch our video for a handy overview of some of the top tips covered in this guide:
What is on-page SEO and what are the principles?
On-page optimization is one of the SEO changes you have the greatest influence over out of all the ones you can do.
On-page SEO is a technique for enhancing your pages so that they are more relevant to search queries, and it is something that anybody can accomplish. Our objective is to create a page that assists the searcher in achieving their goal by responding to the searcher’s purpose. Your efforts should be directed on becoming as useful and relevant as feasible.
Websites come in different forms and sizes, but the set of on-page principles outlined below applies regardless of the subject matter or page layout.
1. Create better title tags:
One of the first things a searcher notices about your site is something that isn’t visible on the page itself. When a page is shared on social media, the title tag appears as a blue link in the search results and as the main heading. This allows us to optimise it in two different ways.
To begin, we may place our major keyword subject target(s) in it, ideally towards the top, to show search engines what this page is about.
Second, we may create titles that are very engaging and catch people’s attention. This technique of standing out in the search results can help us get more clicks. Of course, how you accomplish this is determined on your target demographic and the sort of page in question. The title tags for a product description page and a blog article will be significantly different.
Examine all of your pages, paying special attention to the titles. Are you utilising your keywords to their full potential? And are they as fascinating (and appropriate) as possible? A unique title tag is required for each page, and tags should be 65 characters or fewer in length.
2. Use more interesting meta descriptions:
One of the first things a searcher notices about your site is something that isn’t visible on the page itself. When a page is shared on social media, the title tag appears as a blue link in the search results and as the main heading. This allows us to optimise it in two different ways.
To begin, we may place our major keyword subject target(s) in it, ideally towards the top, to show search engines what this page is about.
Second, we may create titles that are very engaging and catch people’s attention. This technique of standing out in the search results can help us get more clicks. Of course, how you accomplish this is determined on your target demographic and the sort of page in question. The title tags for a product description page and a blog article will be significantly different.
Examine all of your pages, paying special attention to the titles. Are you utilising your keywords to their full potential? And are they as fascinating (and appropriate) as possible? A unique title tag is required for each page, and tags should be 65 characters or fewer in length.
3. Don’t worry about the meta keyword tag:
A bit of advise that won’t go away: don’t worry about utilising the meta keywords tag, despite what some manuals will tell you; it doesn’t assist with SEO.
4. Have sensible URLs:
Most sites may evaluate and optimise their URLs, especially when establishing new pages, which is a more technical subject. A easy approach to make the most of URLs is to make them short, legible, and keyword-subject-rich.
There are a few guidelines to follow, such as utilising hyphens instead of underscores and include your major keyword goal early on. It’s great if you can keep them brief and basic while yet representing the site structure.
5. Make the most of your images:
Your new site, without a doubt, contains many lovely photos. Are you, however, utilising them to their greatest potential?
Make sure they’re as lean as feasible by decreasing their size (both in terms of data and physical size) to make them load quickly. Then, give the image a descriptive filename and use alt tags to offer descriptive text so that search engines can figure out what it is.
6. Have clear headings:
The page’s primary heading informs visitors, including search engines, about the page’s content. We may use the h1 tag to display the major header, and we can utilise heading tags to mark up what is a heading or sub-heading on the page. This is something that most CMSs perform automatically.
Examine your h1 tags throughout your site, and if necessary, use a crawler to locate them all. Do they all correctly describe the page? Is it true that they utilise the keyword target? And do they communicate the same thing as the title tag about what the page is about?
It’s a wonderful way to turn visitors off your website if the title tag says one thing and then your main heading doesn’t meet their expectations. Use variants and natural language to explain your material rather than duplicating keywords in your subheadings.
7. Improve your content:
To sum up, it’s a large issue to wrap up, and it’s also the most wide. Take a look at the material on your page. Is it thorough in its coverage of the subject? Is it comprehensive in its coverage of all relevant keyword variations? Does it answer some of the most often asked questions by the audience? Is it written as well as it can be in order to increase engagement?
Quality content is valued by search engines, therefore you should strive to make your website as good as possible at all times. Take a look at who is ranking highly for the keywords you want to target. What can you do to make a resource that is obviously superior? How do you go about resolving issues?
Want to learn more?
- Google’s guide to a Google-friendly website
- A guide to on-page SEO
- What is on page SEO and how can I use it to improve rankings?
- Learn all the various on-page ranking factors
- How to write brilliant meta descriptions
- A guide to image SEO for small businesses
- How to use structured data to improve your SEO
- 7 steps to Optimising content for Google Answers
How do you get started with technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of optimising your website’s non-content areas. These are usually the things that visitors don’t notice but that have an impact on their website experience!
Technical SEO is primarily concerned with how a website functions and how search engines crawl and index our content. Consider technical SEO to be the foundations of your site; without it, no matter how gorgeous your structure is, it won’t be as stable as you’d like.
It’s easy to get intimidated by technical SEO. Understanding the concepts, on the other hand, is critical. You might be able to try out some of the features or collaborate with your developer on others
1. Do a monthly SEO health check:
You can conduct a simple SEO audit using Search Console even if you don’t want to join up for a third-party tool.
You may use it to check for major concerns like a reduction in traffic or to determine if your site has been penalised in any manner by Google. Major concerns will be notified through email by Search Console, but proactive checks will keep you ahead of the game.
You can use Search Console data to boost your SEO in a variety of ways. A weekly inspection (as little as 5 minutes) may help keep your site in tip-top form, from reviewing your robots.txt files and XML sitemaps to monitoring for new broken links.
2. Is your site mobile friendly?
Smartphone usage is now so widespread that smartphone searches outnumber PC searches. It’s critical to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.
Google wants to reward websites that provide an excellent mobile experience. They’ve even separated the search results for mobile users. How can we tell if our website is mobile-friendly? To check, there’s a useful tool. To thrive in the mobile-first era of search, test your site and work with your designer to make the necessary changes.
3. Have a really fast site:
We’ve all been frustrated by a slow-loading website. And there’s plenty of evidence that sites that take a long time to load perform poorly.
To rapidly build a list of alternatives to assist give your site a bit more zip, audit your site using tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom’s speed test. If your hosting provider is holding you back, you may need to examine it…
4. See how your site looks to Google:
What better method to see whether Google can crawl our material than via their eyes?
There are two options for us. To begin, utilise BROWSEO to insert your page. This tool operates as a very basic browser, displaying all of the site’s tags and content without any of the design components. It’s possible that part of your material is missing because search engines can’t read it — something to look into more.
The second alternative is to use Search Console once more. The Fetch and Render tool allows us to enter a URL, choose whether to examine the desktop or mobile version, and receive a report on how Google understands the website. This allows us to check whether there are any discrepancies between how Google sees the website, how they believe a person would view it, and how we know a browser would show it.
5. Fix broken links:
Pages come and go during the life of every website. It’s entirely common to delete a page, however visitors may be frustrated if their journey is halted by a dead page. Worse, if a page is deleted, it loses whatever value that a search engine has assigned to it.
Check your website for broken pages and links on a regular basis. You can view what problems Google has identified in Search Console, or you can use a crawler to find them yourself. Once you’ve located them, make any necessary changes to internal links to ensure they go to the correct page, and then decide what to do with the old URL. If the page was important or had a direct replacement, use a 301 redirect to point the old URL to the new one. This may appear difficult, but most CMSs make it simple!
6. Upload a XML Sitemap:
Isn’t it fantastic if we could provide Google and Bing a list of all the pages we want them to look at? You can accomplish precisely that with XML sitemaps. This is a file that you upload to your website that contains a list of a site’s URLs. Most CMSs can build one for you automatically and allow you pick which pages to delete.
Once your site is up, you may submit it to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. To detect issues with your pages, examine how many of your submitted pages are listed as indexed on a regular basis.
7. Fix any duplicate content issues:
Duplicate content is a typical SEO issue that may be resolved. This occurs when there are many paths to the same information on your website.
If you don’t set up your CMS correctly, you may be able to view the same information via several URLs. This poses problems since search engines are unsure which version is the best. Fortunately, most duplicate content concerns do not result in a site being penalised unless you are spamming.
Other websites linking to both versions of the page, on the other hand, dilute the potential authority. There are a variety of causes for duplicate material, as well as some good solutions. To detect duplicate content concerns, check your indexed pages (using a site: search) and crawl your site. A clean up of your settings or the usage of so-called *canonical* tags can often assist to solve the problem.
8. Check your robots.txt file:
A robots.txt file is required for all websites. This little but useful file is located at the root of your server and tells robots crawling your site where they may go.
Examine yours to determine if you’re restricting any pages that you want search engines to see. Are there any areas of the website that you need to restrict access to? Search Console provides a useful tool for testing your robots.txt file and making sure it’s operating properly.
Want To Learn More?
- Learn more about Page speed and SEO
- How to avoid a Google penalty
- Robots.txt tutorial
- A guide to HTTP status codes (server responses)
- Using Screaming Frog for simple SEO checks
- The definitive guide to WordPress SEO
- Voice based search: What SMEs need to know
How do you earn links?
After checking a site’s technical and on-page components, most SEO efforts focus on gaining attention and the links that come with it.
What is the significance of links? To begin, links are the internet’s linking pathways, the fundamental means of moving from one site to another. Second, a link from one site to another serves as a citation, indicating that the destination site is valuable or interesting in some manner. These citations are seen as an indication of authority by search engines.
There are as many sorts of websites as there are techniques to build links. Many previous techniques are no longer effective as a result of Google’s crackdown on producing spam links. Much of link-building now consists of good old-fashioned marketing — promotion and public relations. Here are some preliminary actions to take.
1. Find out who is linking to your site:
To begin, you should be aware of your existing link profile. If your site is on a new domain, it’s likely that you don’t have many links yet.
Links to your site is a report in Search Console that may show you which domains are linked to you. Take a look at them; if you like what you see, everything is OK. If you’re taken aback by what you uncover, you’ll need to take action.
If you wish to go deeper, there are a number of backlink tools available to aid your study.
2. Look at your competitors’ backlinks:
Turn to your rivals for insight into the challenges you have in ranking high in your area, as well as tips on how to get started. Take a close look at the links they’ve earned and how they acquired them to learn about strategies you can use yourself, as well as receive inspiration for new ideas.
You may also get a good sense of how many and how authoritative links you’ll need to compete. To check out your rivals’ links, use Google’s link: query to look for their most popular URLs. If you want to dig even further, utilise one of the numerous backlink programmes to find the most influential connections — an excellent place to start is Open Link Profiler, which offers a lot of information for free.
3. Compile your assets (or design some):
One of the best ways to start earning links is by creating something of use or interest to your audience. We’ve all seen them: bits of information that educate or entertain us but aren’t the website’s main offering.
There’s a high possibility you have some excellent materials that your target audience will like. If you don’t, think about it. What can you create that will pique your market’s interest? That others would be willing to share with their audience? Making use of your company’s assets will serve as a hook for attracting attention – it’s lot easier to create links when you have material worth connecting to.
4. Design a link-earning strategy:
You’ve noticed the connections between you and your rivals. It’s now time to start constructing your profile. Set goals, like you would with any strategy, and make sure they are in line with your entire marketing strategy.
You should also spend some time online figuring out where your target audience hangs out so you can generate material that appeals to them in a manner they like. Building links takes time, and the rewards aren’t always quick.
Need help with getting your business found online? Stridec is a top SEO agency in Singapore that can help you achieve your objectives with a structured and effective SEO programme that will get your more customers and sales. Contact us for a discussion now.