Google has a whole host of useful tools that will help you improve your site all can be found under Google Webmaster Tools – some of these will require a developer to help you but many will not. The submit sitemap tool – which we will be happy to talk you through – allows you to tell Google about your website, all of its pages, all of its content and all of its links. So instead of waiting for Google to take its sweet time about it – you can jump the queue and get your site listed and crawled by Google’s bots quicker!

This one you will need a developer to do, it’s very quick so most of them will do it for little or nothing, a line of code needs to be inserted into your site that allows Google to provide analytical data on your website, the number of visitors you are getting, where they are coming from, what they look at on your site, how long they spend on your site and most importantly of all – where and when they leave!

Again something that, depending on how your website is built, you might need a developer to help you with. If your website is WordPress though, its ever so easy! A simple, free plug-in called Yoast allows you to start optimising your pages, selecting keywords to work toward and creating your own meta tags and meta descriptions that will display in Google searches! It’ll give your pages a score so you can improve them and work toward making them as high-scoring as possible.

Once more, depending on your website system, you may or may not be able to do this yourself. However, if you have WordPress – you can do this yourself. What you need to do is attribute what is called a meta tag and a meta description to each image. As much as possible, this needs to be relevant to the page that this image appears on. For example, if your page is about sofas and you have a picture of a living room on it, call it something like “Living room with brown leather sofa” so that it bears a relevance to the page. Google has highly complex word association tools that mean it will look for words that it would expect to appear on the same page together. So “living room” will be expected to be an associated word with “sofa” so it’s good to put those together.

Whether the new algorithms look for this or not is still in debate, but we can’t imagine that Google would abandon what was once such an important element to its search engines. Your content needs to be relevant, and no you don’t have to change the content on every page on your site all the time. A blog or a “recent news” section of your website being regularly updated is enough. If you run an e-commerce website then adding new products counts as updates!

Those are the main things you can do alone, much of the other stuff you’ll need to leave to a professional developer, an experienced SEO consultant who can help drive your website forward is important.

Think of it like fuel for your website – you need to keep doing it to make it work!

If you need any help, advice or you just have questions on anything above then you can contact us and we’ll be happy to help as much as we can!