7 Search Engine Optimisation Techniques For Beginners

If you’ve been researching the best ways to boost organic growth for your website, you’ve almost certainly heard of search engine optimisation.

Optimising your website for Google and other search engines is a proven strategy to increase traffic. The more visitors you drive to your website, the higher your opportunity for conversions, which translates to business growth.

But, for a business owner who isn’t a digital marketing expert, the SEO process can be complicated and intimidating. The reality is that there’s a wide variety of SEO tactics, ranging from very simple to more complex.

In fact, any website owner can perform simple SEO tasks. In just a few easy steps, you can improve your web page ranking across search engines and make significant strides in your search engine optimisation and click through rates.

At First Page Australia, we partner with clients from businesses of all sizes and industries to boost their SEO. We’ve created these 7 simple SEO tips to help get you started on your journey towards website optimisation and online business success.

1. Create Content Using Target Keywords

When it comes to how search engine optimisation and algorithms rank sites, the most important factor is your website’s copy and content.

All search queries include a search term or keyword. If your website content includes these keywords, this triggers Google’s algorithm. It identifies your web page’s content as relevant to what the user is searching for. When this happens, Google lists your web page higher in the search query results.

So, what keywords should you target? There are a variety of ways to narrow down your keywords. One way is to do a simple search and see what Google auto-suggests in the search bar. There are also keyword software tools—including Google’s Keyword Planner – that helps identify the most highly-searched words or terms.

2. Create Quality Content To Drive Engagement

Another factor that the Google algorithm rewards is quality content. You should seek to post articles, images and videos that offer real value to users and improve your search engine optimisation.

This includes making sure that your written content is formatted in a readable, user-friendly way. Use short paragraphs that don’t include more than a few sentences, and break up content with headings and subheadings. These are tactics that help users easily digest information whilst remaining on your page longer. 

It’s important to provide content that offers a fresh perspective on existing information. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers. What information do they want to get from the keywords that they’re searching for?

This will help you curate content based on what the user will find valuable and wants to know, versus what you want them to know.

3. Include Internal & External Links

It’s important to include a smart approach to links in your search engine optimisation strategy. This means having a combination of both internal and external links in your website’s content. 

Internal links help make your site easy to navigate for the user, which is the cornerstone of an optimised website.

External links help your site’s ranking. By including external links to outside high-authority websites, you build your site’s credibility. This means incorporating content from different sources and linking out to them throughout your content.

4. Secure Quality Backlinks

Another effective digital marketing and search engine optimisation technique is gaining quality backlinks. When a high-authority website links back to your content, this signals to Google’s algorithm that your site is reliable and legitimate. 

Ideally, your content is so great that people will feel naturally compelled to share it and use it as a reference. However, the internet is highly competitive, so this may not always be possible. For this reason, you’ll likely have to be proactive about getting quality backlinks.  

One way is to pay for backlinks. This isn’t the ideal approach because websites aren’t as likely to be relevant to your business offering. A more reliable and proven method is collaborating with other high-ranking, relevant sites with guest posts. In return for providing fresh content, the host website links back to your website.

5. Ensure All Aspects of Your Site Are Technically Optimised

It’s not just the things that we create on-page that affect search engine optimisation. The technical behind-the-scenes elements of a website also play an important role. Some of these are more complicated and require a more in-depth grasp of SEO, but here are some simple things to keep in mind:

URL structure:

• Choose a static URL (not dynamic) that you can edit yourself.
• Don’t include numbers unless necessary; especially if it’s a date or a number that will get outdated—updating URLs will hinder your SEO efforts.
• Use hyphens to separate words (not underscores).

The example above shows the URL structure for our blogs. As you can see, there are no numbers and the main words of the title are separated by hyphens. 

Check for broken redirect links:

• A broken link leads a user to a dead-end and almost always results in the user abandoning your site completely. Make sure that all redirect links are working and take the user to the intended destination.

6: Create Optimised Metadata

Most people focus primarily on the content that appears on their web pages. But it’s not all that people see and not all that matters for search engine optimisation. Two important elements of a web page that are often ignored are meta titles and meta descriptions.

The role of your metadata is to communicate what your page is about in a succinct and engaging way. When people are performing a Google search, or any other search engine query, you want to establish a quick connection between your page and what they’re searching for. 

This is why including a target keyword in your meta title is key. The same goes for your meta description. It should provide context while including any target keywords you’ve used in the content.

Learn how to write SEO-friendly meta titles and meta descriptions with firsthand tips from our SEO experts.

7. Compress Image Files To Improve Page Speed

One of the top reasons that online users abandon a website is due to slow loading speed. Slow page speed frustrates users and makes them search elsewhere for the content they need. 

This problem happens when your site has too many large files, as they take much longer to load than smaller files. 
One of the most effective and simplest ways to fix this issue is to compress large image files. Reduce your image resolution to 100-300kb as this is about all you need. You can also use a website like Compress JPeg that’s quick and easy to use.

Conclusion

So there you have it, your 7 tips to get started on your SEO journey! Following these best practices will help you get top-ranking web pages in Google search results.

Are you interested in improving your online traffic? Or would you like help in crafting a comprehensive SEO campaign? As an inbound digital marketing agency from Melbourne, we welcome you to contact us today to learn more about our outstanding search engine optimisation services.