SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is an essential part of any successful online venture.

You can have the greatest website in the world, but without generating any traffic for that website, it might as well not be there.

You could liken it to opening up a shop but not letting anyone know when the shop is opening or where the shop is.

Of course you can go down the paid route, putting money into Google AdWords, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads etc but you should be squeezing the most out of the organic / free avenues open to you.

How can you do this?

Here’s five easy ways to kick start a great SEO strategy:

1. Fresh / high quality content

Google loves fresh, high quality content. Fact.

Oh and by the way, sorry if I keep referring to Google. Other search engines do exist but we all know Google is the big player here.

Fresh content could be a new page, a new blog post, a new case study.

Don’t tell me you have nothing to write about.  It’s simply not true.

It may seem tedious to do and boring to Joe Bloggs, but fresh, relevant, informative content will give you expert status within your industry and be interesting to high quality traffic, i.e. a potential customer.

With one of my sites, content is completely under your control.

Add new content whenever you like.

Add as much of it as you like.

Just ensure that the content is:

• Informative.
• Easy to read.
• Contains lots of keywords relevant to your industry.

Before you publish it, ask yourself if you what you are providing is of real value.  Would you be happy to read it, if you were on the other side?

2. Ensure your website is responsive.

You might have heard the term responsive or mobile friendly.

They both mean the same thing.

Essentially it means that regardless of the device that you use, think laptop, tablet or mobile phone, your website adapts to the device and gives a great consistent experience.

A non-responsive site will be penalised when it comes to Google rankings.

It goes without saying that the sites I provide are mobile friendly / responsive out of the box.

Have a look at this website on some different screens and phones and you’ll see how it could work for your site.

3. Consistency of keywords

Let’s say you have a fashion website and we’re creating a new page about…..shoes.

A strong SEO strategy for a page would mention the word shoes in the:

• URL, more commonly referred to as the pages website address.
• The title of the page.
• Within the description of the page.
• The main heading within the page.
• Subheadings in the page.
• The text in the page.
• Images on the page.

By doing all of the above, we are giving Google a clear message as to what our page is about.

Now imagine a tool that automatically monitors all of that for you to ensure you that you adhere to the above.

Well with one of my sites, you will get just that.

And just as a heads up, ‘shoes’ is likely to be quite a saturated search term.

So if we can get a little more specific, say ‘women’s comfortable high heel shoes’, then we’re going to get a lot more bang for our content creation buck.

4. Add an SSL certificate

An SSL what?

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer.

In laymans terms it means all communications between your browser, e.g. Google Chrome and the website you are going to visit are secure.  You can read more about them here if you are interested.

It’s been a ranking factor for some time now and although there is a small cost involved in purchasing one, I can set it up for free as part of your new website.

5. Compress and optimise where you can to speed up website load times

Faster loading web pages are more SEO friendly.

When you compress code and add it all into a single file, you reduce the number of calls that have to be made to the web server where the website resides and reduce the size of the file that is being called.

This in turn speeds up the loading of a website.

Images are commonly a cause for slow loading web pages so optimising these without sacrificing image quality is also a  no-brainer.

When you get a site with me, the above come as standard.

The beginning of an SEO strategy

SEO is something you have to buy in to when you get a website.

It’s not complicated but it does require effort and discipline.

My websites give you all the tools you need to begin and maintain an SEO strategy that will drive your site up the page rankings.

I’ll show you how to use the above techniques and other strategies as part of the days training that comes as standard with all of my sites.

I’ll even show you how to analyse your competitors SEO strategies so you can see exactly why they are ranking so highly.