Simple DIY principles to improve the SEO of your website

Content creation and SEO go hand in hand at Walking Men. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to find the right content through search. SEO is a digital marketing technique, but at its heart it’s about people. A good SEO strategy is about understanding people, how they behave and what they want.

At Walking Men, we don’t spend much time on understanding the changing algorithms of the search engines. And the truth is, the search engines themselves are changing the game: they are simply looking to match the right content to the searcher’s intent. Subjective concepts such as relevancy and intent have become major criteria.

When the algorithm changes again

This means that the key to improving the SEO of your website is often related to “optimising for relevancy”.

With this in mind, we wanted to share with you a series of simple principles to give you a flavour of what you can do to make your website more SEO efficient.

Three steps to make the right pages visible to the right audience

1. Dive into your website structure, and identify the most important pages: on which pages do you expect conversion, where do you want your target audience to arrive, and where do you explain your business?
2. Then move on to your page hierarchy: are these pages in the right place? How easy is it to reach them within your whole website?
3. And finally, page by page, go into the details such as:
   • the number of internal links: adding internal links from and to your main pages will make them easier to find by users and by search index robots.
   • the text/HTML ratio: add relevancy to the pages and densify your content with new paragraphs explaining your topic in depth. Be sure to focus on your audience!

Two ways to improve your positioning

To improve your positioning on search results pages, you must first have a defined SEO/keywords strategy in place.

You need to have a list of your main and secondary keywords per page at hand, and regularly go back to it.

Then, you can audit and improve the following elements.

Connecting all the dots for a solid SEO strategy on all fronts

1. Start with the SEO-worthy content of the main pages:
   • Page title: is the title too long or too short to be understandable? Is it engaging for my target audience? Is it relevant; does it answer a problem or a need they have? Does it contain a relevant keyword?
   • Meta description: the same questions apply as for the title.
   • H1 and the title structure inside the page: the order and the hierarchy of the titles, as well as their wording, are important. The higher on the page, the better. If possible, try to integrate main or secondary keywords, and develop a storytelling flow.
2. Investigate your images. Integrating alt tags is a real bonus on SEO, as it will help your images and your website to be found on Google Images. But mostly, it is good practice for accessibility.

The alt tag is text used by software such as screen readers, used by visually impared people on the internet. And as we’ve said, this is key to make it as easy as possible for people to find your content!

SEO can sound intimidating, but search engines are constantly improving their algorithms to get ever-closer to what real humans would find valuable. What that means for you is that as long as you focus on putting out regular, relevant, well-structured content, you’ll tick many of their boxes and start to improve your ranking.

Good luck!