SEO Tips - November 2015

Sorry for missing out a post in October – we wanted to allow Basant Properties a little more time in the limelight! So, for November, in addition to our usual 5 SEO tips, we have provided 5 bonus tips on how to increase your page load times!

November’s 5 SEO top tips:

1. Use a good Analytics tool, such as Google Analytics (possibly the very best free to use analytics tool), to get to know your audience then please that audience! Post relevant content, try and get them engaged in your site, and Google will reward you with a higher ranking!
    
2. Your title tags are important to your visitors, as they are to Google – sum up your content in your title. Google will appreciate it, as will your visitors.
    
3. In SEO circles, people often describe meta keywords and descriptions as pointless, and not considered by Google. But what harm can it do, to provide sensible, relevant keywords and descriptions? Especially since descriptions are often used by search engines in their results pages!
    
4. Is your content easy to share? Provide share buttons to increase engagement.
    
5. Give your pages user friendly URLs. Good for optimisation. Good for usability. For example products/goldfish-bowl is far better than a hideous URL like index.php?product=19838290!

Improving your page load times:

1. Enable GZIP compression to quicken up your page download times.
    
2. Increase page load times by delaying your JavaScript. This is easy to do, simply place your JavaScript after yourcontent has run!
    
3. Optimise your stylesheets – if you have styling that only applies to one or two pages then have these in a separate stylesheet and include only on the pages where it is needed, instead of bundling them all into one massive stylesheet that takes longer to load!
    
4. Are your images too large and slowing down your page load times? Simply scaling your images down to a width like 800, or 150 for thumbnails, can see a huge reduction in file size and a huge increase in page load time.
    
5. Specify the height and width attributes to speed your page rendering times!

Do not forget to submit your questions on SEO to our mailbox:  your.seo.questions@webetecture.co.uk so they can be included in an upcoming post where we answer your questions!