For any new business in today’s world, a website is vital to gaining new customers, and with every new website comes search engine optimisation (SEO) which is equally important. If your website is not properly optimised for search engines, then you could fall behind in the searches, no one will be able to find you and if no one can find you, this mean no sales, no customers, no business – and nobody wants that!

In the last of our blogs, we discussed what to take into account when it came to the website's content and how to optimise it for SEO. In this week’s blog and in the latest of our SEO series, we will be discussing more of the content you can’t see - the coding!

The content of a website is very important, however how the code is written is equally important as this is another element that search engines look at when ranking your website.

There are a few things to look when considering code and SEO, keep reading and we will take you through them…

1. Use Static URLs: make sure your URLs end with words as opposed to just numbers and symbols, e.g. www.yourURLhere.com/page-name. This will help visitors know where they are on your website, but also help search engines understand the page.
2. Create an XML Sitemap: a sitemap is basically a file full of all your website’s URLs and is implemented for the purpose of search engines to follow the links on your website so that it won’t miss anything. This is why they should be easy to find on your website for search engines to view
3. Use Unique Title Tag: each page on your website should have a unique title tag that fits with the content of that page as this is what people will see in search engines. It needs to be relevant so it should include the focus keyword of the page.
4. Add Meta Description Tags: the meta description is a summary of the content on the page and is important as it will help search engines understand your content. Iit is what visitors will see when they use search engines. Much like the title tag, the description should be unique to each website page and be relevant to what is on that page.
5. Tag your Pics! This tends to be overlooked but tagging your pictures can help boost your SEO. Search engines can’t read an image so by giving your pictures an alt tag, search engines can’t then read it and determine how to rank it. As always, make sure the text is relevant to the content.
6. Separate Content with Headings: as well as breaking up content into digestible sections for better UX, heading tags are used to help search engines determine content. Putting headings in are easy as most websites will have the option in the editor tool when posting new content, however it's always good to know the HTML code! Heading tags go from <h1> to <h6>; h1 being the highest/biggest and h6 the lowest. H1 tag is used once, and is the main title, with the second heading and subsequent headings using the h2 to h6 tags.

Thanks to Google, online tutorials, and platforms making it easy to use, a lot of these are simple to implement and can greatly help towards how you rank in various search engines, and while they are not the definitive deciding factor of how you rank, every little helps!