SEO is the cornerstone of your organic traffic. All business in Singapore needs it, no matter the F&B industry, medical industry or education industry. One tiny mistake can snowball into a whirlwind of damage.
Luckily, just like different business loans, there are plenty of solutions you can try.
Start by reading the guide below, where we detail 21 free ways to improve your website’s SEO to get more organic traffic.
On-Site SEO Solutions For You
You’ll implement the solutions below directly on your website’s system – that’s why they’re called “on-site.” Let’s begin:
1. Alt Tags
Images need alt tags because these text descriptions tell search engine crawlers what the image depicts. As such, the picture gets SEO value.
Take this example:
If you’re discussing influencer marketing trends, you may add various images containing telling statistics. It’s valuable for the search engine to know you have these pictures; the alt tag allows it to do that because the crawler can’t see those pictures otherwise.
Warning: If your picture is just for décor, you don’t need an alt tag.
2. Categories
Categories function similar to tags, helping search engines understand what your content is about. Let’s say you have an e-commerce website for selling shoes.
Imagine how unpractical it would be to post boots, sandals, office shoes, and trainers all on one page.
Your potential customers would scatter like flies – and search engines too. If those crawlers don’t understand your content, they can’t rank it depending on keywords.
As a result, you wouldn’t have any new visitors because nobody would find out about you.
3. Three Useful Pages
Some companies ignore three essential pages: the contact, terms of service, and privacy pages.
Don’t make the same mistake.
These webpages:
– Offer increased relevance for your customers and visitors.
– Give you a ranking boost on search engines.
– Help you generate more leads.
4. User-Experience
User experience is essential because it:
– Minimises bounce rates
– Keeps your visitors on your website for longer
– Increases the number of pages those visitors interact with
Two fundamental ways to augment user experience is to:
– Devise your website so that it’s mobile-friendly. People don’t want to constantly zoom in or out with their fingers or shift your webpage left to right to read your content. By contrast, a mobile-friendly website gets visitors where they want faster, thus funnelling more conversions. These visits and conversions count in terms of website relevance, so Google ranks your website higher
– Increase the loading speed. A fast website is directly linked to a lower bounce rate and, therefore, deemed more relevant by search engines. Nobody wants to wait around for your website to load.
– Optimise images. Resize and compress those images to fit your website specifically. Make sure all photos throughout your website have the exact dimensions. As a result, your web pages will load faster. Some entrepreneurs will prefer to hire an experienced third party to help with the optimisation. For that, they might need business financing.
5. Internal Links
Internal links will help get more traffic to your website and show search engines that you’re discussing relevant topics. Knowing this is true, many companies include links galore.
That’s a mistake.
If search engines sniff you’re doing link spamming to increase your rankings, they’ll penalise you by showing people less of your website. So:
– Don’t scatter tons of unnecessary links throughout your web pages.
– Add more sources to the mix; you want your content to sound credible and authoritative, not spammy.
6. Quality Content
You want the content you’re writing to be valuable for your customers because the more relevant you are, the higher you’ll rank.
So, whenever you’re publishing new content, make sure it’s original and answers your customers’ needs – no clickbait allowed! As a result, people:
– Return to your website
– Share your posts
– Recommend your products
– Purchase your products
7. Main Keyword
Not mentioning the primary keyword in the first 100 words can mess with your website’s SEO. That keyword shows search engine crawlers what’s relevant within your website.
So, don’t forget to put that keyword high up in the text and sound natural while doing that!
8. Meta-Description
Meta-descriptions are essential even if they don’t influence SEO directly. However, these meta-descriptions attract more visitors to your website.
Getting more clicks is significant because:
– You get more potential customers
– Your increased click-through rates show search engines that your website is relevant
Warning: Don’t duplicate those meta-descriptions!
10. Shorter URL Length
Search engines usually cut longer URLs. When that happens, potential visitors to your website don’t know if your website is relevant or not.
So, keep your URLs short to:
– Increase click-through rates, and:
– Ensure more people remember them.
As a result, you’ll get more traffic – which is the backbone of SEO.
11. Post Structure
Use header tags in your posts to structure your ideas. This structure is essential because it helps search engine crawlers understand each section.
That understanding is essential for SEO purposes because crawlers will deem your website more relevant for a specific audience. And that’s how you rank higher on Google.
12. Relevant Updates
You can’t get more organic traffic if you have irrelevant content. And sometimes, your older posts become obsolete.
Besides, Google shows when that content has been updated last.
That shows visitors you care about your audience enough to offer them quality, accurate information. Thus, you build a relationship based on trust with those visitors so they’ll return to your website.
13. SSL Certificate
Do you know how some websites start with “http” and others with “HTTPS”? That additional “s” stands for “secure” because those websites have SSL certificates.
And Google indexes those certificates, so it ranks websites accordingly.
Basically, using SSL certificates improves SEO quickly because it shows people and search engines that your website is secure.
14. Title Tags
Title tags are essential for search engines and regular people because they clarify your posts’ topics. Again, this clarification equals understanding, which equals relevance, thus improving your SEO.
Pro tip: To build optimised title tags, include your main keyword in them. It’s science!
Offsite SEO Solutions For You
Although we’re discussing your company website’s SEO, that SEO isn’t built only on the backend system. There are plenty of things to take care of offsite too. For example:
15. Spammy Links
Spam links directing people to your website count as negative SEO. The implication that your website associates itself with shady sources brings penalties.
There’s a simple solution, though:
Disavow links tells search engines to disregard certain links when evaluating your website. So, use this tool wisely to remove any harmful links that may affect your rankings.
16. Website Downtime and Uptime
Maximising uptime shows reliability, giving website crawlers more chances to evaluate your website.
Imagine if your website would be down all the time; in this case, the bots see error messages that indicate a non-functional website.
As a result, your website’s ranking can decrease or search engines can de-index it completely.
Pro tip: Reliable backup servers prevent this problem successfully.
17. Good Reviews
Make the most of trustworthy review websites to improve your local SEO. These high reviews from happy customers increase your overall rating and credibility.
Therefore, more people will visit your website and try your products. Besides, search engines will rank your website higher because that extra traffic and purchases increase relevancy.
In turn, better rankings lead to an even higher click-through rate, propelling your website ever higher on Google.
18. Social Presence
Make sure your social presence is up to par to improve your SEO. Here’s how that works:
When you build yourself as an authority figure on social media, you gain credibility and legitimacy. As a result, search engines rank you higher.
LinkedIn is the best place to start for building that authority. Your company page must look professional and provide helpful info to the audience.
Hint: There are plenty of opportunities to add backlinks to your website on LinkedIn, so don’t be afraid to leverage this platform.
Next, don’t forget about social media.
Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, WeChat, and Sina Weibo are more unconventional than LinkedIn, but they’re helpful because:
– You can provide backlinks to your website.
– You create engagement with regular people, thus building your brand community.
– Search engines consider your follower count and posting frequency in ranking your website.
Basically, organic traffic from social media will improve your website’s SEO.
19. Sitemap
The sitemap is your website’s layout. When you submit this to Google Webmasters, the bots can crawl your website efficiently. That means they can index new web pages and rank for the keywords you’re using.
All you need is a plugin for gauging SEO readability, such as WordPress’s Yoast SEO or Google Sitemaps.
20. Canonical Tag
Canonical tags are used for cross-posting content on different websites. Here’s how they work:
– You insert the rel=canonical tag.
– Google gets an alert of duplicate content coming from your website.
– Web scrapers can’t repost your original content to rank higher on search engines themselves.
Thus, canonical tags save you from penalties if duplicate content is not your fault. As such, you ensure your ranking doesn’t drop in case someone decides to copy your content.
21. Data Interpretation Tools
Data interpretation tools are paramount to your SEO rankings. Just look at what the most popular two such instruments can do:
– Google Analytics lets you monitor traffic and visitors’ activity on your website.
– Google Webmaster shows you how search engines evaluate your website.
Therefore, these tools show you how humans and bots use your website. This knowledge is crucial because you can quickly identify and remedy the problems according to your goals.
Consequently, you can improve your website SEO faster.
In Conclusion
Improving your website’s SEO isn’t a whim because ranking higher on search engines brings you more organic traffic and, thus, more conversions. That’s how your company can grow.
However, top-notch SEO optimisation isn’t cheap.
If you don’t have enough funds now, MPM Capital can help. Look at this loan as a guaranteed investment in your company’s future.
