Since the rise of the internet and the growing number of online businesses, SEO has become an undeniably strong marketing tool. This is why so many companies have invested in the services provided by a professional SEO company. In 2017 alone over £65billion was spent in the industry and the spending is showing no signs of slowing down. However, this does not mean any business owner should pay for an SEO expert, because you can improve your own websites online presence simply by following these 5 tips for free.

1    Improve your Websites Page Speed

More recently Google has penalised sites that do not provide a user-friendly experience. One of the main influences on this is page speed. Websites that are slow often take a negative hit on rankings as a result, therefore, it is important for to speed up your site. How can this be done? You can do this by yourself for free and it doesn’t take much effort. The simplest way is to reduce the number or size of images/videos. However, this may not always be possible so you can also speed up your website by reducing the number of plugins or redirects to a page.

2    Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

Having a website that was not mobile friendly never used to be an issue but due to the number of people searching online via mobile phone. Now more than half of all Google searches are made from a mobile device. Because Google always wants to provide a more user-friendly experience, being mobile friendly has become another big factor to successfully ranking online. Again this can be done with no professional expertise required whilst still being very effective. There are two main ways to making your site mobile friendly. You can either choose a website theme that is responsive when setting up your site or implement software that makes your site mobile responsive.

 

3    Don’t Copy Content

This simple tip to ranking better on Google most probably is not an issue for most websites. However, if the website has multiple home pages i.e. aiming to ranking for multiple locations, copied content can cause problems. Google gets confused and only chooses to index one set of content, therefore, duplicating will lead to a page not ranking and the website missing out on traffic. The best way to check for copied content is to use a tool called Copyscape. This allows you to paste in your text and it will automatically show you areas of concern. These can then be adjusted and posted on the website safely.

 

4    Avoiding Over Optimisation

This is a very simple but important tip to getting better rankings on Google. Even though it can be easily avoided, failing to do so can result in websites rankings being severely affected. So how do you avoid it? All you have to do is avoid mentioning targeted keywords too often in the content on the page you wish to rank. For example, if you wish to improve your online presence for ‘Plumbers Bolton’ then avoid mentioning this keyword too many times in the content (title, URL, text, page description…).

 

5    Interlinking Pages

This final tip to getting better rankings on Google is very effective and incredibly easy. By simply including links to your other pages in your content helps readers navigate round the site and find other relevant information on the topic, improving the user’s experience. As a result, this will dramatically improve rankings and should not be overlooked. Why is it so effective? When your website is interlinked not only does it improve the user’s experience Google also crawls all the internal links and if done properly sees them as very relevant links, which passes trust and power between the pages helping them rank.

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Overview

All 5 of these tips can be implemented by anybody who wants to improve their own websites ranking. They are all extremely useful and mostly free. Make sure to take advantage of them as they could really help your website become more visible online and increase its traffic.

In addition, even SEO experts often miss the basics damaging rankings, therefore, if you do choose to pay for SEO services make sure to check these are covered as some can be missed and cause trouble.  If you would like additional help with your SEO, visit our homepage at http://kelsallseo.co.uk to learn more.