10 Simple Fixes Anyone Can Do To Improve Website Ranking

Key Takeaways

Hello. My name's Tim. I'm head ninja at Exposure Ninja. And in this video, we're going to be looking at 10 simple fixes that anyone asterisk can do to improve the ranking of their website. The asterisk, there are some qualifying criteria. Not anybody can do these. You need to be a functioning adult, and you need to have a computer with internet connection. Also really helps to have the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool, which you can download free. Just go on to Google and type in SEO Screaming Frog Spider. Okay, so fix number one is something called an SSL certificate. Oh, this is such a basic thing to do. I invite you to check out my screen. What you see on the screen here is not a good user experience. This is a website we have no affiliation to. I do apologize if you own this website, although you really should be apologizing to the world for this criminal sin, which is not having an SSL certificate on your site. So, you see the sort of error message that Google Chrome can throw if you don't have an SSL certificate on your site. You get this horrendous not secure thing, and you get this awful awful message. To actually get on to this website, you have to click on this, which really doesn't feel like a good thing, and then see the privacy error thing, and then you get on the offending site. Now, actually the offending site isn't too bad if you're partial to a bit of white space above the fold, but with this not secure thing looming down over us like a rain cloud on an English summer's day with some great cricket planned, this is not a good thing. This does not inspire confidence in the user. So, what you'll need to do is talk to your hosting company or your dev ninjas or us at Exposure Ninja to get this sorted and get an SSL certificate on your server. Tip number two is to choose your preferred domain, either https forward slash forward slash your website.com or https forward slash forward slash www.yourdomain.com. Now, the reason that you want to choose one or the other and not have both is that Google could potentially see your website as two separate websites. Having both the https forward slash forward slash version and the www. dot version is essentially like going out for a date with someone who's constantly stealing your food. Right, neither of you end up particularly satisfied and users can get a little bit angry. This basically means that you're splitting any potential link equity coming into your site between these two sites. Some of the links will be going to the www version, some of them will be going to https version. So, neither one is getting the full benefit. Now, to change these settings, you will likely have to go into the HT access file, so you might need a developer to do this. If you're on WordPress, a very simple way of doing this, go to settings, general, and then under the WordPress address and site address, just check that both of those addresses use either your preferred version. If you're not on WordPress, depending on your CMS, you might need to edit the HT access file, which will mean that you will need a developer. Tip number three is to fix 404s. Now, a 404 is basically a webpage that doesn't exist, and 404s are pretty normal across the internet. If I went to your website.com/timcameronkitchen, I would expect to see a 404 because you probably don't have a page dedicated to me. But, what you don't want is links on your website linking to pages which don't exist causing 404 errors. So, what you can do is you can use Frog Spider to find any instances of 404s on your site. Here is how you do it. So, you can see on my screen, I've got the spider open. And what you want to do is you want to put in your website address up at the top here. Click on start. Once you allow the spider to go through, it's going to give you all of the URLs here that it's indexed. Now, to find your 404s, what you need to do is go to response codes. And then on the right-hand side here, you'll see the client error. So, this is going to give you all the four something error codes. So, you can see down here you can see all of the pages which are 404ing. Now, these aren't necessarily bad. This just means that the here is this is a page that doesn't exist. So, what we need to do is find out where that page is being linked from. So, most of the ones here look to be pretty okay. They're just like automatically generated URLs with a bit of error stuff in. But, let's for example, we can go to this one here. And then to find the page that's linking to it, if you go to in links, then here you can see somewhere on the home page we're linking to that URL, which obviously doesn't exist. So, what's going to be happening in this particular case is the link hasn't been formatted properly. So, it you know, it doesn't really make any sense. But, this is how you would find any link. So, what you then want to do is go on to that page and make sure that that link is sorted out because otherwise, you've got a potential 404 issue going on. Tip number four is to fix broken links. Now, to fix broken links, you basically want to find examples where your website is linking to a 404. So, we're still on this page here. We're on the response codes. We've got the client error. And what you can see on this screen, if we just go to in links, you You see all of the pages which link to this error. So, for example, here we have a bbca.co.uk/www.icas.com. That is bringing a 404 because that does not exist. That is a broken link. And if we click on in links, we can see where that link is coming from. None other than the bbca.co.uk homepage. What's worse is https version of that home page and Right? So, remember this site is mostly HTTP, so there's an HTTP version and an HTTPS version and it's not secure and they've got a 404 and they're linking to it from their homepage. So, go through each of your 404s and find out where the links are coming from to give those. Tip number five is to use what's called permanent redirects. So, when you move a page, there's a couple of different ways of redirecting the old link to the new link. So, what does a good redirection look like? Well, if you have permanently moved your page, it's good to use what's called a 301 redirection. If you've temporarily moved your page, then you can use a 302. What you don't want to do is permanently move your page and then use a temporary 302 redirect. If that sounds a bit crazy, don't worry. Let's check it out on Screaming Frog. So, we've just typed in our website address. We've gone to response codes and we're going to click on the redirection. And what we're going to see here is we've got some examples of 301s, which is fine. If they've permanently moved, that is good. If you were to run your site through the spider and you see a whole bunch of 302s and those pages have actually permanently been moved, then you want to change those redirects. And you can check out the blog post below written by the fantastic Andy Chadwick from Exposure Ninja all about how to do that. Step number six is to check your metadata. Metadata is one of my favorite things to do cuz it's low-hanging fruit. To check your metadata, you can do it manually, which is going onto your website, right-clicking, and clicking view page source, and then checking out your page title, which is Where's the page title? There. Now, that's too long. That, my friends, is too long a page title. And your meta description, which is I can't see it. If you can't see the meta description, then you can just do a quick search for the descriptiones. Doesn't look like they're using one, but you can also use Screaming Frog SEO Spider, everyone's favorite. And what you'll be able to do with the SEO Screaming Frog Spider is you'll be able to check your metadata, or you can check your metadata using the SEO Spider from Screaming Frog. So, we see here, for example, you can check the entire page. So, we see bbc.co.uk, that's the URL. If we scroll along, we will see the page title there. So, you can see the length of the title as well. Usually, you want to keep your page titles to around 60 characters. So, 141 characters is You can also check out the meta description. So, your meta description should be about 160 characters. This one is zero characters. So, what you want to do is go through your main page URLs. So, we're having a look at metas. Here's an important page on their site. It's the services page. This is going to be a very crucial page because this page should be targeting a good number of keywords. So, what we can do is scroll along and have a look at the page titles and meta descriptions. So, here is the page title. It says, "Services Ballantyne & Baird, Chartered Accountants, your accountants in Edinburgh." So, it's 80 characters, which is a bit too long, but not too bad. What they could do is just rework it. So, it'd be something like accountancy services, small business accountants, Edinburgh, something like that, which has their target keywords in. Let's keep going and have a look at the meta description. Uh-oh, no meta description. And the reason that metadata is really important, particularly page titles, is that one of the main things that Google looks at first to identify what the page is about and the target keywords it should be ranking for. So, you want to make sure you include your main target keywords in your page title, preferably at the start, uh but you also want to keep it under 60 characters. Okay, step number seven is to check your H1s. So, we can check our H1s in Screaming Frog as well. So, if we scroll all the way over here, we can see what the H1s are on each of these pages. And you can see just from scanning the H1s on this site that this site is in a really poor situation SEO-wise. Now, the H1 on their homepage here is Well, let's just click over on this tab, make it a little bit easier. So, the H1 on their homepage is reach your potential faster and with ease. What has that got to do with chartered accountants? Now, that is failing to talk in the language of the customer. The headline on that page should be very descriptive, talking about exactly what they do, which is they are chartered accountants. So, there's no reason for the H1 not to include the word chartered accountant. We just need to tell people what you do. The same with services, right? Is services a good description of what this business offers? Chartered accountancy services would be much better and more descriptive. Another thing to check with your H1s is that you don't have more than one. Really, you should only have one H1 on your page. So, you can see here we've got an H1 for reach your potential faster and with ease, which has no target keywords, and also another H1 for the word request. Now, that really should be another type of heading. You want one H1. You can have multiple H2s and multiple H3s, but you really only want one H1. Step number eight is to check your site map and submit it to Google. So, in order to check your site map, most sites will have a site map already. If you're using WordPress, then you can use a plugin like Yoast to create your site map. Normally, site maps are maybe linked at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, you can usually find them by just going sitemap.xml if it's an XML sitemap. So, you basically want to check that it exists and check that it includes all your main pages. Now, if you don't know the URL of your sitemap, like I do not know the URL on this site, what you can do is you can go over to Google and you can type in the URL like this. So, you just want site and then your website domain and then file type. And that should give you your sitemap. Now, this site doesn't seem to have a sitemap, which is not amazing surprise. Now, you don't necessarily need a sitemap on your site unless you have a very large site, but it doesn't hurt. Having one does make sense. So, get your sitemap sorted using Yoast SEO plugin and then just get on with your life cuz sitemaps are boring. Okay, step number nine is to remove any links to HTTP pages and HTTP resources. You can find these by going to internal and you're going to look for any pages with HTTP in. And then once you've found them, you're going to go down here to inlinks and you are going to remove any references to HTTP pages. You're going to update them to the HTTPS version of the page. Now, this site, because it's so it's still HTTP. So, to find any links to HTTP versions of your pages and then replace them with links to the HTTPS version, what you would do is you go into Screaming Frog and you would search in here for HTTP. Any pages that show up here when you do that search, you then want to go to in links to see where they're being linked from. Then go to that page that's shown in in links, then update that link to the HTTPS version. Now, if you search for HTTP and there are no results in this section, that's good news. That means there are no links to the HTTP version of any of these pages. Tip number 10, we're nearly home, people, is to check for no index tags. Now, no index tag is a little piece of code that tells Google not to index that particular page. So, sometimes this is useful if you have some content, for example, stuff that you give to people after they opt in, which you want to hide from search results. Otherwise, people will be like, "Well, I'm not going to opt in cuz I can just search for that thing and oh, there it is. Great, I've got it." So, in that sort of situation, you'd want to no index something. Often, though, a site that's struggling with ranking, they actually have no index set to some of their most important pages, basically telling Google, "You can't index this." We were reviewing a site yesterday, which had the whole site was completely no index, meaning you're basically saying to Google, "Please don't index our site." And then saying to ExposureNinja, "Please help us to get ranking." I mean, talk about conflicting messages. Back to everyone's favorite painful amphibian. Um under indexability, when you've put your website in here, you'll see the majority of your pages are indexable. Sometimes, they're non-indexable. So, this one you can see is non-indexable because of 404, so it's non-indexable because it doesn't exist. Uh let's see if there are any that aren't. Doesn't look like so. Ah, there's one that's no index. So, that page there, under salary, we're saying to Google, we don't want that page to be indexed. Now, that's quite a common thing to be indexing like a category page, particularly if it's a tag category, because that page is going to be essentially useless. It's just going to be full of duplicate content, so you might want to no index your tag uh category pages. What else have we got here? We've got the uh CSS sheet. What else we got? We got a redirect. Got some other pages. So, this looks to be pretty good. It's basically just CSS sheets that aren't being shown, and we've got this one here. So, the lost password page looks like it's been no index, which is probably sensible. Other than that, it doesn't look like this site is doing too badly in the no index status. I mean, everything else is just a total dumpster fire, but in the no index category, we are safe. But, when it comes to erroneous no index tags, put your button away, mate. So, I hope you found this video on 10 relatively straightforward SEO fixes that almost anyone can do. We looked at SSL certificates, adding preferred domain redirects. We looked at fixing 404 pages, fixing non-404 broken links. We update looked at updating redirects to 301s from 302s. We looked at optimizing your metadata, optimizing your H1s, optimizing your site map. We looked at updating your internal links to HTTPS, and we looked at checking your no index tags. Remember, if you need help increasing your website's organic ranking on Google, you can request a free website and marketing review from Exposure Ninja. Go to exposureninja.com, or click the link in the description to request your free marketing review. I just want to tell you a little bit about what it includes. So, what happens is we'll ask you a whole bunch of questions about your website, about your business, and about your goals. We'll then go away and put together a 15-minute video recorded on the screen showing you exactly how to improve the ranking of your website, also having a look at some of your competitors, as well. We'll also show you how to generate more leads from your site even with your existing traffic, so it is genuinely awesome. So, go to exposureninja.com to request that. Don't forget to like and subscribe this video. Leave a comment if you've got any questions about SEO or you want to just rip me apart for being stupid. And also, don't forget to follow us on our social channels. We're active on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Until next time, keep the bun away, get your SEO fixed, and I'll see you soon.