Along with having relevant, high quality, up to date and engaging content, here are 6 easy ways you can immediately improve your SEO and search engine rankings:

1. Have a mobile friendly site

Google now penalises website for not being mobile friendly. With 50% of online searches now coming from mobile devices it’s important to ensure your content can be easily accessed. Your website should also load quickly when viewed on a mobile device and be easy to navigate around. You can test how mobile friendly your site is with: Google’s Test My Site which does a quick online evaluation then gives you an overall rating.

2. Reduce your page load speeds

Ensure your website pages load quickly as this is a contributing factor when it comes to how highly your site is ranked by search engines. You can keep an eye on your page load speeds in your Google Analytics account or by using an online tool such as Pingdom Website Speed Test.

3. Optimise your images

In order to keep your page load speeds down it’s essential to optimise your images, reduce their size as much as you can without losing image quality. Another hot tip is to make sure you use your keywords in the filename for your images (e.g. digital-marketing-training.jpg). If you don’t have access to Adobe Photoshop there are some wonderful online photo editing tools you can use, one of my fave’s is Canva, which has an extensive range of templates already made with the correct sizes for social media cover images and profile pictures. I also use BeFunky to quickly resize my images.

4. Good header tags

Make good use of your header tags. Using headings to appropriately break up your text into meaningful sections not only helps readers to scan through information but it also helps search engines to read your content and identify the quality and relevance, then rank your site accordingly. Headings should succinctly summarise the paragraph/s immediately below them, ideally with at least one of your target keywords.

5. Fix any broken links

Too many broken links on your website may be a sign of old content or make search engines think your site has been abandoned, and therefore won’t rank very well. If you don’t have many pages on your site it’s fairly easy to keep an eye on, but once you start growing your site (especially if you’re a blogger) you’ll want to use a tool to scan your website for you such as a broken link checker. I’ve used DeepTrawl many times over the years, it’s a very thorough tool.

6. Outbound links to quality sites

Then there’s outbound links… if you have links from your content that go off to other quality trusted websites (that google ranks highly) this will help lift your search engine rankings. But like everything, it needs to be in moderation. You can’t have a page with just a truckload of links to the most highly ranked pages, the search engines will be all over that.