How to Improve Website SEO

Written by Julia Giantomasi
Published on October 12, 2023

SEO is a three-letter acronym that encompasses so many things. Standing for “Search Engine Optimization,” it’s the process of improving your website to increase its visibility through a Google search. You can get as deep into SEO as you’re comfortable with, but it’s important to at least know the basics and always make tweaks to your website to get as many visitors as possible. Here’s a breakdown of the different areas of SEO and what to keep an eye out for when working on your site with tools that can help keep each section in check.

SEO Basics

There are a few basic things that are good to set up at the launch of your website, but can be added in on the back end later on as well. If you’re using a platform like WordPress, it’s a good idea to install an SEO plugin like Yoast. This add-on will unlock extra tools to help boost your website’s SEO with minimal effort from you. You’ll also want to make sure your website is indexed so all pages and content can be found. Lastly and equally as important, create and submit a sitemap for your website. This is a blueprint of your website that helps search engines find all of the different pages on your website. Speaking of all the different pages, keyword research is also important when creating content. In a previous blog, we detailed the strategy of keywords and tagging. Feel free to brush up on those tips to make sure search engines are picking up on the topics that summarize your content and get to your target audience. 

Technical SEO

A big factor in designing websites today is making sure it’s mobile-friendly since so many users are accessing your page on their phone. Whenever you’re creating pages or making changes, it’s always good to pull it up on your phone to see how it looks and if all the features work correctly on a mobile device. Other technical details to check are site loading speed, using “HTTPS” in the URL, and identifying broken links. Basically, anything that isn’t serving a purpose on your website should be fixed, like broken links or orphan pages disconnected from the rest. If anything is moving slowly or acting buggy, see if you can get to the bottom of why because all of this affects your SEO. Not sure how to quickly check these features? Use free tools like a Site Audit to check the “crawlability” of your website.

On-Page SEO and Content

When writing content for your website like news articles, blogs, or informational pages, keep in mind the readability of that content. This is another place where SEO plugins can help, scoring the readability of your words and making suggestions for improvement. Other free tools like Grammarly can provide SEO writing assistance. Make sure the images you use are optimized for SEO and include meta descriptions for each page. Your content should be organized and properly tagged and outdated content archived or updated to keep SEO simple. The good news is, if you’re ever overwhelmed with the complexities of SEO, a quick online search will result in a wealth of free tools that will audit pages and make suggestions for areas to focus on.