Using SEO to attract visitors to your website

Search engines play a vital role in driving visitors to websites. If someone were to search for "radio stations near me", those that effectively use SEO (search engine optimisation) would be listed ahead of their competitors in search results.

You can set up analytics tools on your site to see how many visitors come from search engines, social networks or directly.

Nowadays, SEO doesn't have to be a specialist skill. The key thing to know is that by writing better-quality web content for humans who will be reading it, you will also improve your site's ranking in search engine results.

Here are some tips on growing your search engine reach:

Write content for people, not algorithms

The simplest way to ensure your website ranks highly in search results is to ensure its pages are written to appeal to the people who will read them, not just algorithms.

As well as populating keywords in your pages' metadata, it's more important that crucial keywords are included in the page title, page URL/slug and in the first few paragraphs of your page content.

For example, a meta title like "Radio advertising with [Station FM]" will contain the keywords "radio" and "advertising" as well as your station name - these are all terms potential advertisers may search for. Using generic or non-specific terms like "Get involved" or "Be part of it" will affect your potential reach through search engines.

Aiir's CMS allows you to specify a page summary, meta title and keywords which will be made available to search engines as they crawl your website.

However, search engines are a lot smarter than they used to be, and littering pages with as many keywords as possible in the hope of casting the net wide won't necessarily influence where your site ranks in search results.

Google now tries to understand the topic of pages it crawls instead of being led by meta keywords. Simply repeating keywords over and over in page content won't improve its search ranking. A better alternative would be to use synonyms so it's clear throughout what your page is about.

For example, on this page, repeating "SEO" over and over doesn't make it any clearer if you don't understand the term. Paraphrasing it like "improving search rankings" or "increasing traffic from search engines" throughout the page makes it easier to understand.

Link out to external 'authority' sites

Providing sources from which visitors and search bots can see where your site's information has come from can greatly increase trust and help establish a positive reputation.

While media organisations may not like referencing their competitors for fear of driving their audience away, citing sources helps search engines determine where the content on websites originally came from.

Think of it like the difference between a news article that says, "It follows reports that..." and one that says, "Last week, they told BBC News..." with a link to the original story. The latter not only builds trust by showing the provenance of a developing story—who said what, when, and where it came from—but should there be any dispute over the content, your site is clear where it originated.

Keep visitors on your site for longer

Another factor that determines your site's position in search results is how many people click on your site and then immediately go back to the search results, having not found what they are looking for.

SEO experts call this "pogo-sticking", where someone hops to your website, realises it's not what they wanted, and hops to another result instead.

The solution to this is the same as we mentioned earlier: your site's pages need to be written in a way that is easy for humans and our attention spans to understand.

By breaking down longer pages using subheadings or lists, potentially lengthy pages are much less daunting and easier to find what you are looking for at a glance.

You can also include links between various pages of your site to encourage visitors to stay on your site for longer and not hit their "back" button.

Regularly 'prune' any old pages

Search engines crawl and index your website regularly. They know which pages you have published and which of those visitors are searching for.

Any old pages still published online but attracting minimal web traffic are known as "zombie pages." They don't add anything to your website but can drag it down the search rankings if it is bloated with outdated or unpopular pages.

Search engines care about this because they want to discourage sites from publishing thousands of similarly-titled low-quality pages in the hopes of gaming search ranking algorithms.

Google says it prefers "one stronger page versus many smaller pages" when determining search rankings.

Snazzy infographics can make sites less accessible

While it might be tempting to create images containing lots of text—whether just a simple table or some fancy infographics—search engines cannot read text on images as they crawl your site. Any text content burned onto an image with your page won't count towards boosting your search ranking.

This doesn't just affect search engines, but people too. Visitors who use screen readers or other assistive technology won't be able to read any text burned onto images.

When you upload images, you should provide alternative text or "alt text," which will replace the image for anyone who can't see it (assistive technology and search engines).

The best alt text briefly summarises an image, explaining what it depicts and how it relates to the page content that surrounds it.

For example, if the image below was used as a button linking to your Facebook page, useful alt text would read "Visit our Facebook page" rather than "Facebook icon".

If you are conveying more complicated information through an image - for example, a graph - you should summarise the key bits of information rather than copying/pasting the contents as they are into plain text.

Using this example, good alt text would read, "A graph showing the relative value of radio advertising compared to other methods. It shows radio delivers the most ad impressions per £1 spent, with its nearest competitor, out-of-home advertising, reaching just 51% as many people."

A bad example would be "Ad impressions delivered by medium per £1 ad spend" - that's what the text in the image says, but it lacks the context of the visual data.

This also applies to embedded videos and audio clips. While there's value in using multimedia content - you should make sure there is an alternative way to convey the same information. This might mean transcribing quotes instead of just uploading a clip.

Some search engines also factor in how long it takes a page to load in their ranking. So, if you are uploading huge infographics or full-size presenter photos that only appear as thumbnails, you may benefit from resizing the images before uploading them to boost your page's position in search results.

Making your website as accessible as possible will help search engines discover your pages and ensure that every visitor can read what's there once they have reached the page.