Every website developer and designer would love to have their website rank higher in search results on search engines such as Google. Higher ranking on search engines will attract attention to your website and bring you a wealth of new visitors.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the science of improving your website’s search engine ranking. Even though the criteria for ranking are always changing here are five simple SEO tips you can apply to your website today:

Keywords

When writing your webpage content, use relevant keywords that are more likely to show up in search queries done by people that may potentially visit your site.

The Google Keyword Tool is an easy and free tool you can use to do your keywords research before you proceed to editing your text. Relevancy is key and by knowing which keywords people look for, you can then build your website content around it.

Page Titles

Arguably one of the most important SEO Elements, having unique page titles for every single page on your website is critical. The title of a page should relate to its content in order to maximise relevancy. Avoid stuffing page titles with lots of keywords as this is disliked by Google and can prevent your pages from ranking higher.

Content

In SEO content is king. Update your website content regularly and be sure to use the most relevant keywords identified in Point 1 above. The most visited sites are the one that have constant fresh and relevant content pouring in. Start a blog on your site and update it regularly with content about your industry and your company. Your company will soon be seen as an authority on the subject and it’s a great way to interact with customers and fans.

Images

Google can only search text and not text in your images — which is why you need to make the words associated with your images as descriptive as possible. There’s a lot of traffic that comes from image searches so it’s something that every webmaster can’t afford to miss.

You can start with your image names by adding an “ALT” tag which allows you to include a keyword-rich description for every image on your site. Make sure it’s concise and accurate – don’t stuff keywords in here!

Sitemap

A sitemap is a file with a folder tree type view that links to every page on your website.

If it is created in the proper format you can then submit it to Google using Google Webmaster Tools.

Google will then be aware about all the pages on your site, including the ones it might not have found yet.

By submitting a sitemap of your site, search engines will prioritize crawling your site and index all of its pages sooner than they would have if they had to find it among all the other pages on the Internet.