Beginner’s guide to SEO in Glasgow

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the process of improving a website to increase its visibility online, specifically through search engines. There are many different ways to increase your website rank on search engine results. Part of this process is formatting each webpage to be more readable for the search engine and to be more relevant to the desired keywords. The more the search engine knows and understands about your page the easier it is to be evaluated as relevant or not. This will affect its position on the search results. Of course it is not just for search engines. Having a website that is easy to read, simple to navigate and is relevant to the searcher’s query is going to impress the website users. SEO is ultimately about driving more traffic to your website and increasing customers, whether that is sales or signing a contact form or any other desired action that you want customers to take while on your website. In Glasgow, SEO is being implemented for more and more businesses, sometimes in house and sometimes through digital marketing agencies. To help you get started with SEO in Glasgow read this guide for key steps in making your web page readable.

Structure and Hierarchy

By giving each section of content a heading you are breaking the content down into manageable chunks. This is more appealing to the customer but also easier for the search engine to read. The search engine will focus on the words in the heading in order to know what that section is about. Headings are an optimum place for keyword placement as it reinforces the relevance of that particular section. Using headings and sub headings also creates a hierarchy. It tells the customer and Google that the information at the top is the most important and as you work your way down to smaller headers, it is information branching off from the original content. The page will look organised and readers will be able to identify sections by the headers provided. The search engine will be able to measure relevance from the keywords and understand the content based on the structure of the page.

Images

In likeness to the use of headings, the placement of images on a page breaks up the content making it easier to read. When adding an image onto your webpage you have the option of adding a title, alt text and description of what is on the image. What most people don’t realise is that search engines don’t see images the way that humans do. If you have a picture of a dog being groomed on your dog grooming website, the search engine only knows that it is an image of something. By putting a heading, alt text and description the search engine knows that this image is relevant to your content and to the search term. The image title and description are self-explanatory, however the alt text is something you may not be familiar with. Alt text was originally for people who are blind or have poor eyesight. On a system with settings that can read from the webpage to those who are blind, the alt text will be read out as well so they know there is an image and what is in the image. The alt text is great for SEO as it is another opportunity to use the keyword and to show the image is relevant to the content on the page.

Links

In SEO in Glasgow, link building is very important as it builds authority for your website. By including a link to a trusted site that is relevant to your page content you are boosting the reliability of your page. As well as links to exterior sites, there are links to inner pages. By linking directly from your content to other relevant or related pages on your website then you are improving navigation, thus refining the overall SEO.

Key Words

Incorporating ample amounts of keywords to your page is key to achieving a higher ranking status. As aforementioned you should try to incorporate keywords in to the HTML or code of the page. There are several options including in the image title and description, in the content headings, SEO title and the meta description. On a basic level, keywords should be used throughout your content. Typically each page will have one main keyword, although it is possible to include other keywords in the text if it is relevant. However your main keyword should be used in the headings, images, page titles and metas. This is important as when a customer types in that keyword to Google, and Google places your website in the top results, you want that customer to be linked to the correct page.

SEO Title

The SEO title is the name of your page. Search engines pay close attention to the words used here as it tells the search engine what the page is about, therefore it is important to use you main keyword here. This is a step that most companies miss without guidance from professional digital marketers. Having a page title that is the right length, is relevant and includes your main keyword will help boost the rank of the page in the search results. The SEO title is usually 60 characters long.

Meta Description

The meta description is a summary of your webpage and its content. The same as the SEO title this is part of the code. It is usually 160 characters long. Search engines will usually display the meta description beneath the page title and the URL in the search results page.