People search for anything and everything on the web and there’s a high volume of users constantly searching every moment of the day. That traffic can be extremely powerful for a business, and by having proper search engine optimization (SEO) you’ll have a better opportunity of bringing that heavy traffic to your website. SEO is the use of relevant keywords on your website to drive users from search engines. It allows for more relevant content to be presented to users and can connect audience members to ideas they’re interested in. In order to leverage your SEO to help drive more relevant traffic, leads, sales, and ultimately revenue for your business, here’s a guide full of tips to help you utilize SEO to your advantage. 

Create good metadata

There are two tags you should optimize on your website pages, the title tag and the description tag.  Your title tag is going to be short, and to the point.  Make sure to include your keywords in your title tags. Description tags are a bit longer, and can be treated as an advertisement for your webpage. It should be as compelling and relevant as possible. The description must match the content on the page, but should still be appealing. It’s essential for the most important keywords for the web page to show in the meta description. Although having keywords is important to good SEO, keyword stuffing in your title or description tags is counterproductive and doesn’t help anyone search for your site because they’ll assume your result leads to a spam website. Your description tag should still read like a normal sentence.


Keep Your Character Count Within the Guidelines 

A meta description (second description in photo) should be no more than 135-160 characters long. Any longer and search engines will chop the ends off, so make sure to know how many characters are in your description. 

Use URL Slugs to Maintain a Clean URL 

A slug is the part of a URL which identifies a particular page on a website and explains the page’s content. For this article, for example, the URL is “knockmedia.com/seo-tips” so the slug in that is “seo-tips.” Using a slug for your page can positively affect your SEO. It allows you to include keywords in the URL, which is one of the indicators search engines use to determine what a page is about. Using a slug also creates user-friendly URLs. WordPress and other platforms create URLs for new pages by default and they may look like www.knockmedia.com/P=32216. By using a slug, however, you’ll be able to clean up that URL, and incentivize users to click on it. 

Internal Linking

Many websites use internal and external links. Internal links connect pages and posts within your own website. External links connect your pages to other websites. It’s important once you’ve gotten a user to your website to engage them (browse your site more).  When you’ve written various articles about a certain topic you should link them to one another. This will show Google – and your users – that those articles are topically related. You can even link directly from sentences in your webpage, no button required. Check out our article on user engagement and why it’s important here.

Add engaging images to your site to draw attention

Images are the first thing users see when they visit your page. Social media sites and search engines generate their own previews of sites, so by adding an image you’ll have the ability to create a custom thumbnail. Photos that stand out more will attract users’ attention and they’ll be more inclined to visit your site and engage with your content. The better the picture you have, the more likely the user will notice your content. Search engines also note if a page has picture content too. 

What other SEO tips do you use on your website? Do you have an SEO project that you’d like to get started on? We’re happy to help, please reach out to us here or on Twitter or LinkedIn!