5 simple tips to boost your SEO

1. Content is king for SEO

Fill your website with good content! First and foremost, make sure you have relevant content about the keywords you actually want to rank for, preferably with a page for each keyword. Make sure to include the words you want to rank for, preferably in both headings and body text. 

Besides having good pages with content you want to rank for, it's good to continuously update your website with interesting blog posts and other good information. If there's one thing we know, it's that Google loves content. 

However, remember not to upload a bunch of posts "just to" rank better on Google, but make sure that the text for your articles/pages actually maintains high quality and is relevant to your website.

2. Optimize images

This is a simple fix that can yield a lot of results. Every time a visitor comes to your website, all content on the page must be downloaded. The size of your website affects how long the loading time will be. 

Long loading times negatively affect both the user experience and SEO. There are many things that can contribute to longer loading times, but something that slows down many websites is images that are too large.

Try to save your images in as small formats as possible when you upload them. I try not to go over 100kb, but the smaller the better. Many larger images can be saved in smaller formats without affecting quality. A good tool is Tiny PNG.

3. Be clear

Is there a clear structure and a red thread on your website? A complicated website with a complex hierarchy and many pages with similar content can make it difficult to read, both for users and for Google. Therefore, make sure you have your most important pages linked in the menu, possibly with other related pages in a submenu. 

Also, make sure you don't have too many pages with similar content. Sometimes it might be better to add text to a page you've already set up, instead of creating a new one. Or maybe it could be an interesting blog post, rather than a new subpage.

Once you have a clear structure you are satisfied with, it's a good idea to add a sitemap to your website. This is intended to show how the website is structured and what the hierarchy looks like, so that it can be navigated in a smooth way. The sitemap is usually linked from the footer.

Remember! If you make changes to the structure of your site in such a way that URLs change, don't forget to make redirects, 301s, from the old to the new web address. If you miss this, you may get broken links and 404 pages, and also lose organic traffic from the old URL. To check if you have any broken links, you can use the tool Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

4. Make it mobile-friendly

Whether you like it or not, mobile usage has largely surpassed computer usage. In almost all different categories, more traffic comes from mobile than from computers, and generally, over 70% of all traffic comes from mobile. That Google now also goes by Mobile First indexing makes it even more important to make your site mobile-friendly.

So make sure your website looks good and works well on both computers and mobile, so both your users and Google will be happy. There are a few different tools to check if your website is mobile-friendly, I like this mobile-friendly test from Google. There you can see how well your site is adapted, as well as suggestions for improvements. 

5. Work with natural link power

Good on-page optimization is necessary to rank, but it also requires showing that your website is relevant by having other websites link to you. This is mainly the area where there is a lot of cheating and tricks, and in some industries, it's also common to try to sabotage competitors. 

Of course, the best would be to have thousands of websites naturally referring to your site through links with good anchor texts, but since it doesn't look like that for most of us, you often have to work a bit on this yourself.

Therefore, many people work very hard to get links to their site. For example, you can build your own link sites, exchange or buy links from others who are link hunting, or buy ads on websites that themselves have a strong link profile. 

If you neither have the time, desire, nor knowledge for this, fortunately, there are several things you can do to get completely natural links as well. Does your company have customers? Check if they can link to you from their websites. You can think about being active in forums, where you include a link to your site in the signature. Do you (or someone you know) besides the website also have a blog? Link from there! Simply think about being active with your site and sharing it when there's an opportunity.

Of course, there are hundreds of other things to think about too, but there are some basic and relatively simple things you can keep in mind when trying to rank high in the search results. Basically, it's about having a clear website that is easy to understand, with good content that people actually want to read. Both Google and your visitors will thank you!