On-Page SEO Archives - ApprenticeTips.com

White Hat SEO: Top 5 Tips on improving your SEO

January 20, 2023January 20, 2023 by Andrew Pulman

What is White Hat SEO?

‘White Hat SEO’ is the term used for SEO tactics that are in line with the terms and conditions set out by major search engines, including Google. Equally, you can brush up on what SEO is on our post ‘What is SEO and why is it important?‘.

The opposite to to this is Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is the term for SEO tactics that are not within the search engine’s terms of service. White Hat SEO refers to any tactics that have been approved by the search engine’s terms of service. Additionally, this will increase the search rating of your website whilst maintaining the integrity of your website. These tactics are in line with the guidelines Google has outlined and you can find more information on all of them here. These tactics are the best way to increase your search ranking without even spending a penny though it may take some time to kick in. It can be up to 6-12 months before you will start to see the effects, regardless, don’t let that put you off because these will work in the long run.

White Hat SEO just out of the top 5

Have compelling Title Tags and Meta Descriptions – These are 2 of the most important Tags on your page. If these are not enticing, people will not click on your page.
Optimise your Images – Make sure to use the best file format, compress those images, add in Alt Tags and lastly, use lazy loading to make sure crucial content in displayed
Loading Speed is Key – Use Googles PageSpeed Insights tool to analyse you pages loading speed, as this is a primary ranking factor
Internal and External Links – Make sure to build an internal link structure to establish a hierarchy for your website. Also the right External links will increase your credibility

Our Top 5 White Hat SEO Tips

1. Be familiar with the webmasters SEO Guidelines.

To make sure you are adhering to the White Hat SEO tactics laid out by the Webmasters. You can see Google’s Guidelines to help you understand what you will need. By sticking to this you will not enter the ‘grey’ area of Black Hat SEO.

These guidelines inform you on how Google finds, indexes and ranks sites. Learning about these will give you an insight into how and why Google ranks sites an will allow you to optimise your site safely. It also details illicit methods that can lead to your site being blacklisted or banned permanently.

You may want to consider performing an SEO Audit of your website. Tips on how to do this can be found in our post: How to Do an SEO Audit: The Ultimate Checklist. This process will help you further your understanding of SEO and help you improve the effectiveness of your current strategy.

2. Publish relevant, unique and quality content

Publishing original content that is unique and helpful to the users. That does not mean that it has to be in depth and extremely long. Though Google doesn’t recommend a specific post length, we think, for the best results you should aim to hit at least 1000 words. Try to solve hard problems and share your learnings, data and challenge the way that people think.

A great way to do this is to find topics that are relevant and trending in the industry and tackle them from a different angle with new data and perspectives. Having great quality content that is unique will need to be relevant to the users, this will be touched on when we talk about the User Intent. In Contrast, if you decided to produce content that is ‘low-quality’, often duplicated and only intended to get people to a page, this is Black Hat SEO. Stay clear of this as is those bots at google catch you, you will have to start all over again.

3. Use Keyword tools and place them strategically and organically

Using keywords is important. Using them organically and strategically is better. The best tool to use for this is the Google Ads Keyword Planner. Conducting keyword analysis will help you stay away from keywords that are overly competitive and identify the best short and long-tail keywords to use on your site. This will also help you to match the User Intent (there’s that phrase again).

Another good way to brainstorm long-tail keywords is to go to google and search for something. Google will then give you options on how to finish off the search. These are the most common search’s related to what you’ve typed already. E.G. If you type in ‘Harry’, google will list the most common search’s i.e. ‘Harry Potter’, ‘Harry Kane’, ‘Harry & Megan’ and ‘Harry Styles’.

Begin to type the words you want to rank for note the phrases that Google suggests, these key phrases tend to be less competitive whilst also being more appropriate to your page.

To use keywords organically on your page try to utilise them in page titles, meta descriptions and image alt tags. This is very important as it will boost your SEO greatly. Additionally, you don’t have to have the exact match keyword in your content. For example, if your longtail keyword is ‘Vegetarian pizza recipes no tomato‘ then this could be hard to get into a sentence naturally. Search engines will recognise those words within a sentence like this ‘these are the best recipes for vegetarian pizza with no tomato that I’ve ever tried’.

It is important not to over do it with keywords as this would be classed as ‘keyword stuffing’. Overuse of the keywords in Titles, Headers and meta data is deemed as a Black Hat SEO technique. Try to incorporate them naturally to avoid any danger.

4. Consider User intent

User intent (also called ‘Search Intent’) is highly important to understand when creating your content. This is the search query that the user has typed into their search engine. The better the match to your page, the higher you will appear.

Firstly, understanding what people are going to search for and satisfying search intent is a top priority for Search Engines. By doing this you will pass their test and be much more likely to appear on the first page on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Also consider how people search for what you are providing. Test it out on colleagues, family and friends. Furthermore, use Googles search function to pinpoint the best way to match the users Search Intent.

There are 4 common types of search intent:

Informational – when users are searching to learn about a subject
Navigational – when users are looking for a specific page or website
Commercial – when users are trying to learn about a product before making a purchase
Transactional – when a user is intending on completing a purchase or action.

Also make sure to use this along side step 3 and match the Keywords to the intent of the user.

5. Strive for a positive User Experience (UX)

The User Experience (otherwise known as UX) plays a big role in improving your Search Rankings. Google would much rather send you to a page that users find easy to use, loads quickly, is well structured and is mobile friendly.

There are several ways to improve your UX as shown above but the mot common ones to look out for are:

Headers and Sub-headers – using these will help build a structure to the website that helps the likes of Google to better understand your content. Using Sub-headings within headings (H1, H2, H3) will make the text more accessible an readable to users.
Make the Content Visually Appealing – Visuals like Images, videos, screenshots and infographics will also help readers understand your content better as it will help segregate the the content and get the points across
Avoid using intrusive pop-ups – In 2017 Google introduced guidelines that would penalise sites that use intrusive pop-up ads. They can be seen as annoying and cause users to leave the site. It is wise to use these sparingly. Find out more on this here.
Use White Space – Including white space on a webpage will increase legibility, branding and focus. The Interaction Design Foundation stands by this in their article and so does Google! Using white space in fundamental in a good design.
Mobile Friendly Sites are Key – 99.4% of the UK used mobile phones as of January 2021 so if your site is not mobile friendly you could be missing out on a huge audience. However, it is also crucial when it comes to UX because Google uses mobile-first Indexing. Use Google’s mobile-friendly test to check your site.

These tips will help you improve your UX. Not to mention that you Loading Speed will also have an impact on your UX.

If you found this information useful and would like to learn more take a look at our other posts helping with a variety of Digital Marketing tips.

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Our Top 5 SEO Tips for Apprentices

June 15, 2022June 15, 2022 by Holly Spence

If you’re new to the world of digital marketing, some of the fancy jargon and terminology can be a tad intimidating. But it doesn’t need to be. We’ve put together our top 5 SEO tips for beginners and apprentices who are struggling to know where to start with their marketing.

Before we go any further, let’s address the elephant in the room. What is SEO? Simply put, it’s an abbreviation for a marketing phrase that you’re likely to come across countless times during the span of your career. So, drum roll please…

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of driving more organic traffic to your website through free and natural search engine results. It’s all about taking steps to help a website or piece of content rank higher on search engines like Google, whether that’s on-page or off-page.

On-Page: Building content on your site that’s relevant and provides a good user experience.

Off-Page: Enhancing your website’s search engine ranking outside of the site through backlinks. We’ll get to those later.

Let’s get to the juicy stuff.

1. Keyword research

In simple terms, keyword research is the process of discovering words and phrases that people use in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Having said that, it’s important to not just choose the first keyword you find. Do your research.

When optimising your website content, you want Google to pick your website for being the most relevant. That’s why it’s important to make sure you’re using appropriate keywords. To find them, you can use any online keyword research tool which will bring you results for the term you searched as well as any similar ones.

Some useful tools include Ahrefs, Ubersuggest and SEMrush. These tools will also tell you more about the search volume and the keyword difficulty too.

Using relevant keywords within your content is part of what’s known as a “white hat strategy”. You’ll create the best content possible and in return build a sustainable audience. However, you want to make sure that you’re not stuffing your keywords. That’s where one of our next SEO tips comes in.

2. Avoid black hat strategies

Black hat strategies refer to going for quick gains and this is a big no-no with the search engines. It involves duplicating content, keyword stuffing, adding invisible keywords, and linking from sites with irrelevant content. Although this may work in the short term, if your website is found to be doing any of this, search engines will penalise you and could even blacklist your site. Don’t do it!

3. Understand user intent

This is an important one. Google puts A LOT of emphasis on intent. It wants to understand what the searcher is looking for when they type something into the search bar. As the content creator, it’s important for you to understand this as well.

Having a clearer idea on what users are searching for is a head start to being able to optimise your web content. Answer the public is a great tool that shows you popular searches and queries that you can then use to create useful content that matches the searcher’s intent. This could be informational, transactional, navigational, or local. Make sure you’re the one providing the user with the right answer.

4. Monitor the results

Next on our list of SEO tips – monitor the results! As with any activity in marketing, you need to make sure that you’re monitoring the results of whatever it is you’re doing. That includes SEO.

If you can see an improvement in your work, great! Keep it going and remember that SEO is a constant marketing activity. You don’t just do it once. You need to keep coming back and checking it.

If you see little improvement or worse, a decrease, then stop. Try some new keywords or maybe a different blog topic. By monitoring the results, you’ll be able to quickly identify any issues.

5. Build trust with backlinks

Backlinks are links from one website to a page on another website. They’re crucial to SEO. Authoritative backlinks are one of the most important signals that Google considers when ranking content. Having high-quality backlinks from reliable sources that are relevant to the content on your website is a recipe for SEO success and building trust. It may take a while to build up, but the results are worth it. Guest posting and creating content that people find useful are the first steps in generating backlinks for your website.

The SEO Tips Takeaway

To conclude, SEO features a variety of activities that need regular and consistent maintenance. That includes researching the right keywords, sticking to respectable techniques, knowing your customer, monitoring results and building trust with backlinks.

For more tips and tricks on how to develop your digital marketing skills and the latest apprenticeship opportunities, keep up to date with our blog.

The Ultimate Guide for On-Page SEO

September 23, 2020September 23, 2020 by Emily

From title tags to images, this is the ultimate learning guide for On-Page SEO.
This guide includes key 9 factors to boost your SEO efforts in 2020 so your web content is always optimised.

What is SEO?

Firstly, SEO stands for search engine optimisation and it refers to a process of techniques that help you achieve better rankings for your website in organic search results .

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimising web page content for search engines and users. On-page SEO methods include optimising title tags, content, internal links and URLs.

There are lots of factors on your website which you can control and enable search engines to index your content, understanding what it is about.

Here are the 9 factors that affect On-Page SEO.

Indexability

For any website to achieve any kind of ranking in the search engine results page, it has to be indexable for the search crawlers to find it. Storing a text file called “robots.txt.” on the server, communicates and sets instructions for bots to tell search crawlers which pages they can crawl & index from your site and which they cannot. This “ban” is applied using the word “Disallow”.

It’s useful if you want to hide confidential pages that shouldn’t be published on the search results page but is part of the website. For example, customer login dashboard.

URL structure

The way your URL is structured, affects your SEO. Your URL should always include your brand name and a relevant slug that indicates to the searcher what type of content will appear on the landing.

Keep it short and sweet if possible.

Avoid special characters in the URL: It makes it difficult for search engines to crawl.

Images (alt attributes)

Block and blocks of text can seem overwhelming & put off searchers who are just looking for a straightforward answer. Images are a great way to break up content, allowing the eyes to focus but it also helps SEO too.

Search engines struggle reading images unless it has ‘alt text’. Alt text are short pieces of text which simply describes the image. Its useful for many reasons:

Browser will display alt text if your images can’t be displayed due to technical error.

Improve accessibility: Reading software for the blind use alt attributes.

Title Tag

A title tag is the text that is displayed on your browser tab when you open a webpage. It is also shown as a blue header link that appears when your website shows up in the search engine results page. It is part of the ranking criteria for Google so you should:

Use the website’s central keyword in the title tag.
Not exceed the maximum length of the title tag (70 characters)
If possible, use your brand name in the title tag.
Use a unique title tag for each web page.

Meta Description

This is a bit of text that describes what a specific page is about. Meta descriptions are typically displayed as text below the title tags.

Google may not use your description to understand the content on your page, but searchers use it to figure out which result to click on – so it needs to be enticing, short & sweet.

You should:

End your meta description with a call to action.
Limit your description to maximum length of 175 characters, or the description will be cut off in the SERPs.
Use a separate description for each web page.

Headline Tags

Using headline tags helps structure your website content, making it easy for web users and crawlers to understand it. Use H1 tag per web page and use header tags in chronological order.

Internal Links

Using anchor text to link between pages of your website suggests that the linked page is about the keyword or phrase in it. So, you can greatly increase the relevance of a web page to a particular subject or keyword.

Loading Speed

Search engine also monitor the technical performance of your website. How quickly your site content loads, is a big factor that counts towards SEO success.
To improve performance, you can:

Use low resolution image files so it loads faster and doesn’t take up too much storage space.

Mobile Optimisation

For many years now, mobile friendliness has been a major factor in search engine optimisation. Traffic is becoming more mobile, whatever the topic. So, if your website is not optimised for mobile, you will be giving potential traffic a bad user experience and therefore decrease in traffic which will affect your SEO.