Our Top 10 SEO Tips and Best Practice for 2021

Setting up Meta Information has been a staple of SEO for many years but it still amazes us how many websites we come across that have no title or description setup on any of their web pages.

Meta Information, or Meta Tags, are snippets of information that describe the page's content; they help inform the search engines what a web page is all about. They do not display on the page itself, but only appear in the source code – you can see the Meta Title and Description of a web page on all search engine listings and is the title that you click on to visit the website and the few lines of text below (see screenshot).

Each web page should have its own unique title and description, packed full of key search terms and phrases relevant to the content shown on the corresponding page.

We all know how annoying it is when a website takes ages to load! And, we often leave sites that are slow loading as it is either a bad experience, or the site seems untrustworthy! In fact, if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of visitors will abandon the site and 80% will not return.

Get rid of non essential elements or plugins you don't need, optimise your images (see TIP 8) and make sure your domain is configured properly. Every improvement you make can increase the number of visitors to your website.

Contact us today if you want us to check the Page Speed of your website for free.

Content quality and uniqueness has always been a critical factor for ranking and SEO success.

• Never copy content from other websites
• Always use your own unique content (or use a professional copywriter)

Extra Tip: Write for humans first and the search engines second. Try and include key terms of course, but remember, search engines are just robots and do not have credit cards, it is more important to engage the reader and the rankings will come.

Once you have added content to your website, for a particular service for example, it is unlikely to change. However, if you can, try and keep it fresh by updating it every now and then. We always recommend adding reviews or a blog to a website as an easy way to regularly add new unique content to your site. Keep an eye out for our next blog on 'What to blog about as a business online'.

Another old but gold one. Headings are used to help visitors find exactly what they are looking for on the page. They add structure and signposts for the reader and more often than not, they will contain keywords or key phrases that you want that page to be found for.

How to use them

You are likely to see different levels of headings when editing a website H1 (Heading 1) to H6 (Heading 6). These are ordered by size/importance. H1 would be your main title and H2-H6 would be used for sub headings and can be used for each separate topic on a page.

Extra Tip: Never use more than one H1 heading on a page.

To learn more, get in touch with us today to discuss SEO

Have a look at the url for this post: www.websitesorted.com/blog/our-top-10-seo-tips-and-best-practice-for-2021

Although it is quite long, it is easy for our readers and the search engines to understand. There are spaces, denoted by the hyphen, between each word and it contains key terms we think people may search for when looking for SEO help.

This is how your URL's should be structured. Avoid using numbers or characters that will make it hard for the search engines and users to know what is on the page. Try and use the keywords, phrases or locations relevant to the page content.

Most people are aware that links to your website are good for SEO. We would always encourage you create high-quality links to your website from your social media profiles, customers, blog sites, online directories etc. However, it is important to remember that linking to these sites from yours, you will find that more people will link back to your site naturally.

Google wants a completely secure web in the future. Therefore, it is paramount that the data passed to and from your website is secure and encrypted. Adding an SSL certificate to your site to provide a secure connection between your visitors and your website will identify your site as safe for the search engines to crawl.

You will see a website domain that is secure is prefixed with HTTPS! is yours?

It has always been important to make sure you resize images to improve page load times, as mentioned in TIP 2. However, visual image search has increased massively and people will use them to view information and purchase products.

Make sure that you are using high quality, relevant images with a customised file name and alt tag (text description of what the image is) that is relevant to the content on the page where it is being used.

Although the internet is global, most users are searching for products and services local to them, whether it's a local plumber or a local nursery.

Local SEO has long been important but it is now even more important due to the increase in zero-click searches e.g. the user find the answer to their search query in the search engine listings without having to visit a website, like the phone number of a local restaurant.

Make sure you have created a Google My Business page. If you already have one, make sure all of the contact details are correct and encourage your customers to leave you positive reviews.

If you require any help setting this up or obtaining the ownership of an existing listing please get in touch so we can help!

With an array of great free tools available, there is no excuse for the above techniques to be incorrectly implemented on your website. You can use www.woorank.com to audit your site instantly.

Please get in touch if you would like us to complete a free SEO audit on your current website for you.

Help search engines, browsers and crawlers understand exactly what is on your website by adding Schema Markup

Read our full blog post on what this is and how to use it on your website.