Our philosophy as a digital performance agency is to uncomplicate the terms of the Digital world and make them accessible to everyone.
How to optimize a website's SEO to world top level is not complicated. In fact it's a lot simpler than it sounds. Let's start, for those just starting out, by explaining what SEO is and how do you optimize for SEO?
In practice, SEO (search engine optimization) is a set of rules that allow search engines (Google, Bing, ...) to identify your site's content and assess its quality, at different levels. The better the content and performance of your site, the better your ranking in organic searches.
Good SEO performance doesn't guarantee top3 in the search rankings, but it helps you get much closer, and you will be able to see weekly rankings rises.
Tip 1: Evaluate your website's SEO performance
SEO optimization should always start by evaluating our starting point. There are several tools to do this, at Gigantic we use Semrush which is unanimously considered the best SEO platform.
With Semrush we can quickly go through our competitors' sites and extract the keywords they contain. From these keywords we build a project, where we add the extracted keywords but also other keywords identified by the system and that are not being worked on by any competitor.
Semrush then gives us information on the position of each competitor by keywords, and the monthly search volume for each word. From this evaluation we can understand exactly which keywords we rank for, which ones we should be ranking for, and which pages need to be improved.
In parallel Semrush also gives us a report of technical improvements to be made such as broken links, duplicate tags, etc.
Example: Born agency blog
Tip 2: How to optimize SEO and the Content structure of your website
There are two fundamental rules for optimizing SEO, the first is to ensure full alignment between the content of the site and the way our audience searches, the second is to ensure that this content has a well-defined hierarchical structure.
In this sense it is fundamental to go back to Semrush and choose exactly the keywords that we want to work within the services that our company provides, the positioning that it wants to have.
Then we must organize all these words/themes into a very well-defined content structure that defines main topics and sub-topics, just as we do in an academic paper or article.
Main topics >
are the main themes where we would like to be better #ranked", and they should be broad enough. For example on Gigantic's website, the main theme is
Digital Performance
then the main topics are:
and then within each of the topics we will have subtopics. It is important to say that these sub-topics have to be strong enough to be developed into a sub-page, a blog article or a video.
Tip 3: Structure of Website and Page Headings
Here we got into a slightly more technical part but still quite simple to execute. We have defined topics and sub-topics, created pages and content within our site for each of them. Now we need to optimize each of the pages, the first point being to define a clear headings structure.
Headings, are basically the structure of headings within a page or website. When we create a text box within the website, we have to say, if it is H1, H2, H3, ... H6 ...
It is through the heading tags, that google understands the hierarchy of the content on our website. For example the page title should be H1, the subheadings H2, the sub-subheadings H3, running text from H4 onwards, as needed.
There are specific rules for how many H's a page should have.
For example, H1 there can only be one, H2, there must be 4 or 5 on a page, and so on.
This all seems logical to us in a book, and it is exactly the same on a website.
This is how we optimize our seo step by step.
Tip 4: SEO Copy
Perhaps this is the one SEO rule that might be most confusing to Lusophones and all people with languages of Latin origin, where we are taught that repetition of words is a negative thing.
Basically any page or blog post should have a power keyword, which will be the one we want to rank in google rankings.
This power keyword or keyword combination should be repeated a lot in the text, for example in a blog article, between 5 and 10 times. The recommended density is between 1 and 2% of the text.
This is where the mastery of good SEO copy lies, how to do it without it seeming forced ... it has to look natural, and the reader can't be left with a feeling of forced repetition.
Tip 5: Optimize Image Size
To the chagrin of many designers the size of images still counts for the performance of websites.
Fortunately there are several ways to optimize the size of images, through wordpress Imagify plug-ins or through sites like Image Compressor
It is also important not to forget to enter the Alt/Descriptive for each image, which should contain our power keyword.
Finally, and for those who don't have time to waste on SEO, there is an alternative to all these steps, which is to hire Gigantic 's team to do it.
If you liked this article on how to optimize seo or if you have other simple tips please comment on this post.
A hug to all.
João Félix da Costa - CEO Gigantic