Improving Search Engine Rankings

There are three main areas in which clubs can focus on in an attempt to improve Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

TITLE TAGS
A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site.

If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results. Words in the title are bolded if they appear in the user’s search query. This can help users recognise if the page is likely to be relevant to their search.

ALT IMAGE TAGS
The alt attribute provides alternative information for an image as Google reads text. Avoid writing excessively long alt text that would be considered as spam.

Add Alt text by right clicking on the image (when in the Edit Content text editor) and click on properties.

CONTENT
Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For example, a baseball fan might search for [dba], an acronym for the Dandenong Baseball Club. However, a new fan might use a more general query like [baseball playoffs]. Anticipating these differences in search behaviour and accounting for them while writing your content (using a good mix of keyword phrases) could produce positive results. Google Keyword Planner is a free SEO tool that will help you to discover keyword variations and the approximate search volume for each keyword.

BEST PRACTICES

Write easy-to-read text, unique content

Stay organised around the topic. Avoid dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph, subheading or layout separation.

Create content primarily for your users, not search engines

Don’t worry about keyword Meta Tags - because the keywords meta tag was so often abused many years ago (with people including many often irrelevant keywords), Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag. Google now disregards keyword meta tags completely and they don’t have any effect in search ranking.