If you want to show some love for your website this Valentine’s Day, here are some top tips to help it soar up the website rankings. As a content writer, not as a web designer, I am no SEO expert but I know enough. This means when I write and create pages for customers I use every opportunity to ensure that those pages are seen by search engines and turn up in relevant searches.

Five Key Tips to Get Google to Rank your Website Higher

1. Add more Content

Google, and other search engines, don’t like inactivity on a site, they will use up to 200 algorithms when deciding which search results to show. One of the things that can influence your rankings is new content. This could be in the form of blogs, news items, new pages, new images, podcasts, case studies or events. So make sure you add new content on a regular basis and keep things that might change, like links and references, up to date.

2. Use Key Words

Key words or phrases are those that your customers would use when searching for goods and services similar to yours. There are plenty of places to check these – you can ask your customers or brainstorm with your team or research competitors.  Try the Google Keyword Planner, a free-to-use tool within Google Ads (you don’t have to advertise) – there’s a helpful article here . Key words can be broad like ‘online marketing’, targeted like ‘seo services’ or combined with your location ‘online marketing in Telford, Shropshire’.

3. Improve your Titles, Headings, Subheadings and Images

Once you have your key words or phrases (long tail keywords), make sure these appear in the title of your page, blog or post. Titles tell your readers and search engines what the content is about, the more compelling the title the more reasons for people to click through.  You should also use keywords or variations of your key words in your headings and subheadings. Don’t forget to add in your alt description on your images – these can include your key words or phrases too!

4. Write great Meta Descriptions

When you, or your web designers add content to your website, you have the opportunity to write or modify a Meta Description if you don’t Google, will try to find a relevant part of your post to show in the search results. Try to include your key words and make it different to other pages so that it accurately describes the page/post content.  If you use WordPress you can install Yoast SEO – which will help you with your title tags and Meta Descriptions. It has a traffic light score system – you should aim for as many greens as possible.

 5. Use Keywords in your Content

It goes without saying that you should make your content easy to read and also use keywords and phrases in your copy. Don’t use too many, you are still writing for humans so it has to make sense. If you put in too many you could also be penalised for ‘keyword stuffing’. You need a balance between good keyword density and an overly-optimised site which Google will see as tricks and penalise by decreasing your ranking.

So that’s my top 5 tips, how anyone, can get Google or other search engines, to love your website. There are lots of others of course like having external links pointing to your site but these are not always easy to achieve.  Do try Yoast SEO. to help. If you have enjoyed this blog check out some of my others.

Happy Valentine’s Day!