SEO Consultant
I am often asked “where can I find an SEO consultant?” by people who want help with their websites. As an SEO consultant myself this is an easy question to answer! But many people aren’t entirely sure what SEO is let alone what an SEO consultant does.
Quite simply SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. It’s a rather pretentious phrase which is about getting your website easily found by the search engines. Ultimately it is about getting your site to be found higher up the search results than any of your competitors. That’s why business attracting traffic online get very excited about it and very competitive.
If you want to ‘SEO’ your pages it’s usually best to ask an SEO consultant but you can also have a go yourself. There are lots of things you can do to achieve this. If you have a site already then you may be compromised by what you’ve done to it already but essentially here are 10 things an SEO consultant would advise that you be thinking about:
1. Relevant content – it’s true that ‘content is king’ if your site is not giving good content value then it will not be optimised as much as it could be. Make sure it’s relevant to the searcher.
2. Title-tag – this is the name of the page that is live. Take a look at the source code, the ‘title tag’ at the top is one of the first things the search engine sees when looking for a relevant result for someone’s search. Name the file after your keyword. It’s not as powerful as it used to be but it’s not unimportant.
3. URL- try to make the title of your site (URL) the same as your main keyword/s. This can be very difficult but there are ways round this even if you think the URL name has already been taken. Split your main words with hyphens – EG if dogtraining.com is taken try dog-training.com
4. Meta-tags These are keywords in your copy that define the content of your page and make sure these correspond with keywords that are being typed in
5. H1 Heading – on your landing page, make sure that the first piece of text is your keyword and make sure it is in H1 text
6. Sub-heading – likewise make sure that your sub-heading is also the same keyword but this time in H2 text
7. Copy – put your keyword several times in the copy on your page. But don’t stuff the page
8. Site map – have a site map. This will help Google to know and order what is among your pages
9. backlinks – arguably this is probably one of the most important aspects of SEO. It is possible to trump all the above with backlinks from high authority sites
10. Links on page – Make sure the links you have on your page (if any) point to good relevant content (preferably on your own site)
11. Longevity – Google considers the age of your site as important. There isn’t much you can do about this if your site is new. But as time goes on obviously you will score better on this.
There are lots of other things you can do both on site and off site to SEO your content. If you want to learn about this then that’s what an SEO consultant would help with.