I’ll show you 5 basic things that you can do to boost your website’s presence. No coding required, just basic SEO stuff than anyone can do.
No charge, no fee, just sharing the good stuff for free!
(No affiliations, I’m too busy for that)
Your Situation:
Maybe you have a new website and need it to rank higher.
Perhaps you have an established website and see your competitors taking the lead above your search engine results.
Whatever it is you need to achieve, my 5 tips will help you big time. If these tips are too basic, don’t worry, check out my other blog posts that are more advanced. Now let’s SEO!
About the Author
Ignatius Davis
Ignatius has been a search engine optimiser and digital strategist since 2005. Qualified in E-Commerce, Economics and Change Management.
Get in touch about SEO!
Tip #1: Website Speed
Check your website’s speed. This is one of the first things I do when I assess a client’s online presence. Google takes seriously the user experience of its customers (the ones who use it for search).
So if your website is too slow, you can lose your ranking spot or even get penalized for poor performance.
The first thing to do is to check your website’s speed objectively. This doesn’t mean loading it up on your phone or computer and simply gauging how quick it was. That result cannot be trusted for many reasons. But let’s keep it basic.
This is what you have to do.
Go to PageSpeed Insights by Google which you can find here: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
There are many great options to consider to gauge website speed, but this is what I find to be the easiest option to see what your website’s performance is.
When you visit PageSpeed insights You’ll see this bad boy waiting for your input:
Now I’ll use the url of my own SEO consulting and SEO Blog website: ignatiusdavis.com
And this is the output that PagSpeed Insights gives me:
If your result is above 90 and in the green like you see above, then great stuff! time to move on to Tip #2.
Wait, what?! Your site is in the red like below?
Don’t feel bad. The internet mainly consists of slow websites.
Which is great news since speeding your site up can place you miles ahead of your competition.
So here’s the major and final advice for improving your website speed:
Reduce the size of the images you use on your website and use the blazing fast Webp format.
Don’t stress 🙂 I’ll show you how.
Reducing image size
I use Microsoft PowerToys to quickly reduce image size. Once it’s installed just right click the image and click on “Resize““:
But if you’re on a mac or wish to use an online platform you can try: https://www.simpleimageresizer.com/
And here’s the final touch of Tip#1…
Convert to WebP for awesome SEO performance.
What is Web?
I’ll quote the Google Developer’s site:
WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.
Google Web Developers Site
Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.
WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs.
WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.
There are a few ways to convert your website’s images to WebP. I’ll share two ways.
- On a PC download ABIC … I won’t be sharing instructions for this, but the software is well supported on the sourefourge site here. It’s a small app that you drag the image into. Select Webp and Lossless and click “Convert” and your image will convert nearly instantly. This is my favourite way since it also convert batches of images (large amounts).
- Use CloudConvert to quickly convert images. There is a limit of 10 images per day, so if you have large projects may need to purchase a subscription.
Converting to better formats like WebP and working with smaller images will certainly impact your website’s speed performance positively.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that all your speed woes are over. We’re not going to cover it here but here are some of the other factors that can affect your webspeed:
- Server speed (I use SiteGround * not affiliated)
- Plugins (they may take too long to load)
- Google Fonts (yes it slows down the site)
- Scripts like Google Tag Manager
- Script heavy themes or frameworks
- Synchronous loading (everything loading at once)
There’s so much to go into here… Let me know if you would like another article on something more specific.
Let’s move on
Tip #2: HTML Heading Tags (H1,H2,H3…)
This is a pretty big deal. I know I said no coding required and that’s true. This is all determined by clicking on options on your platform. Whether you’re creating content on Google Docs or WordPress or Joomla or Wix or Squarespace, your headings can be the weak link for your website.
Let’s quickly discuss what this is all about…
Google Search’s John Mueller has explained on numerous occasions that heading tags help Google to understand the structure of a page. Google has several recommendations for using heading tags because it helps Google to understand what your site is all about.
Look at the homepage of my website at ignatiusdavis.com :
Those highlighted headings make it possible for a human or a reader to know what the website and content is about.
The first heading is big and bold and says I am an SEO based in Perth, Australia (my clients are local and international). This what my site is about.
The second highlighted line gives a bit more information but is a sub-heading, which should be an H2 tag. The final heading in the screenshot is “SEO and Digital Strategy” which is also an H2 tag.
So what the page is about is H1 :”SEO Consultant”
The subheading: SEO Partner
Another subheading: SEO & Digital Strategy
I recently had the privilege of auditing a very high profile organization which I cannot name here, but, they had the worst webpage heading structure I’ve ever seen.
Here it is with only the heading tags revealed:
This may seem technical, but this is how I do this quickly and easily.
Caveat: You need to use Chrome, Firefox or Edge browser for this to work…
Download the “Detailed SEO” extension here: Detailed SEO Extension for Google Chrome (Free) | Detailed.com
Once it’s installed you should see this icon in the extension part of your browser:
Click the extension on any webpage your visiting and you should see a helpful box full of SEO information. Click on “”Headings”” and you should see all the details of how your headings are structured.
Changing the headings on your website.
On most platforms, such as Wix, Squarespace, Google sites, Google Docs or WordPress, highlight the text and look for options (either by right clicking or scanning the user interface) for options where it shows “Title, heading, Header , H1, H2 or subheadins”… Here are examples
How to select Heading Tags in Google Docs:
How to select Heading Tags in SquareSpace
How to select Heading Tags in WordPress
Heading Tag Structure
Try have one H1 tag(you can have two but it’s not recommended at this basic level), subheadings as H2 tags…then sub headings of those sections as h3 and so forth. Once you start a new sub topic under the main topic of your home page, go back to using H2 and then continue the process.
Example:
- H1: Iggy’s SEO Site
- H2: My Services
- H3: Technical SEO
- H3: Local SEO
- H2: My Values and Mission
- H3: Helpfulness
- H3: Doing SEO for Free!
- H3: Integrity
- H2: My Services
- H2: Contact Me
What this will create will be a clear picture for Google or Bing on what your site is about.
You’d be surprised to see the difference clear headings can make to your search engine ranking. Let’s move on to the next tip!
Tip #3: Above the Fold Should Be Helpful
Imagine you open a website and nothing on the page is helpful. So you scroll down and then finally find the information you need.
This is a pet peeve of Google Search and should be avoided at all costs.
But what does “above the fold” mean?
Above the fold refers to everything that can be see on a mobile screen or computer monitor on the first load of the webpage. The moment you need to scroll down, it would be “below the fold”.
Here is an example of our client Swann Rubbish Removal:
Semrush has a great article on best practices for “above the fold” here.
I’ll give you direct SEO advice about what to have above the fold and what google expects.
- What the webpage is about such as a heading
- A supporting sentence or paragraph about the topic
- A contact detail if it’s a service you’re offering
- An optimized photo (if relevant) depicting the topic of your article
If you ensure that this information is on a mobile screen or computer monitor without requiring the reader to scroll, then you’re doing a great job on this one!
Overall message: Make sure the most helpful content loads up on any screen to ensure the user knows that they’ve found the right webpage for their needs!
Tip #4 : Make every page accessible
This touches both on internal linking as well as navigation structure.
Search engines use crawling programs to visit your site and to follow every link they can find. If you have web pages on your site that cant easily be found, then they can’t be that relevant or important to you or to the search engine, meaning the page or pages may not even get indexed!
So two things to do right now:
Make sure that every blog post or page is easily accessible through the navigation menu. The rule of thumb is that any content on your site should be accessible between 1 and 3 clicks. So if someone needs to click 4 or 5 times to reach your content… you’re not doing it right.
The second thing is to make sure that you’re linking between relevant pages on your site.
If your page is about leak detection, then linking to another page on your website related to leak detection provides the reader and search engine crawl bots an easy way to find linked and related content.
As a rule of thumb, any page should have at least 5 unique inlinks: this means that 5 separate pages on your website should link to the page you’re working on.
Got it?
Final tip…
Tip #5: Keywords and Topicality
Make sure your page mentions the keywords that you want to rank for. Might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many website manage to not mention the exact phrase that they actually want to rank for. (Warning: trying to outsmart a search engine by mentioning the phrase you want to rank for multiple times without context is called keyword stuffing and is penalised by Google.)
However, keywords will not be enough to get you to that spot. You also need to have words and phrases relevant to the topic of your keyword.
So if you have a website for a window cleaning service, then you’ll need to write about more than “window cleaning”.
You’ll need to mention phrases and topics such as “window washing”, “the process of cleaning windows”, “clear windows”, “window panes”,”dirt”,”dust”, “grime”,” cleaning liquids” “prices”etc.
You see, search engines are not just looking for phrases, but mainly for information to match user intent.
Your webpage text needs to signal that you’re the right page to match what the user is looking for!
A dance school’s website should include words and phrases that will signal that it is a dance school and not a purely information page about dancing in general. If someone searches for dance moves, then they’re most likely looking for a video or demonstration of a type of dance. If someone is looking for dance lessons, then the dance school page should mention “courses” or “lessons” or “classes” to signal that the webpage matches the searcher’s intent.
I hope you have found this information useful and that it gave you some insights on what you could do to help rocket your web search ranking in 2023.
Please feel free to reach out to me if you need professional SEO help with your business or organization’s online presence. I am an SEO consultant that helps customer across the world.
*This article did not use any AI tools.
Till next time!
About the Author
Ignatius Davis
Ignatius has been a search engine optimiser and digital strategist since 2005. Qualified in E-Commerce, Economics and Change Management.
Get in touch about SEO!