How Can I Optimize My Website?

There are several things you can do now to optimize your website. Here are 10  practical ways to optimize your website.

1. How To Do Some Keyword Research

A keyword is a word or phrase that people use when they are searching for your business. If they are searching for an activity centre, they might also search for the terms “adventure centre””, ““outdoor training centre” etc.

They might use the American spelling of “center”. You need to find out what keywords your customer will search for and ensure you have them in the right places on your website. Use a thesaurus to check for variations of the words you are already using. The activities you offer are also keywords e.g. kayaking, rock climbing, paint-balling etc. Your audience will also determine your keywords e.g. stag parties, team building etc.

There are several sites where you can enter your business or domain name to get a list of keywords that you can use. Here is a one such website: keywordtool.io.

Searching for keywords in keyword.ie

If you put the phrase “adventure centre” into this tool you get the the names people have searched for from Aberdeen to Upminster.  If you scroll down you will see that the word family appears twice.

Additional phrases found when searching for “adventure centre”

If you cater for families, you should add family to your list of keywords.  Check to see if there are any other search results that you can use. 

2. How To Optimize For Local Search

If you entered the term “adventure centre” into the site  keywordtool.io you would have seen that most of the results include a local place name e.g. a general area “Peak district”, a county like “Devon” or a town like “Melksham”. If people are searching for an activity centre, they are probably searching for one in a particular area. So if people were searching for an activity centre beside one of the lakes in Cheshunt, they could use any one of the following terms in the search as well as the keywords discussed above:  Cheshunt,  Broxbourne and Hertfordshire.

3.  How To Use Your Keywords 

Now that you have a list of keywords and local search words, you need to use them on your website. There are many different parts of the website where you should use keywords, but these are the main ones:

Title: Ensure the title of your website includes the main keywords e.g.  The title of this activity centre includes the keywords “Herts Young Mariners Base Outdoor Centre”.

Page names: You should call each page something meaningful rather than just numbers e.g.  calling them swimming, walking, location etc. is good. If you want to use several words in the page name you should separate the words by  dash e.g. Ultimate-Ops-Laser-Tag.html. Or if you are writing a blog about SEO for activity centres, , you could call your post “seo-for-activity-centres-10-ways-to-optimize-your-website.

Content or Body Text: Ensure your content or Body Text mentions your keywords. Your description or text should naturally mention your keywords.  The first sentence on your home page could be: Welcome to the Lake District adventure centre where we have a wide range of activities on offer: archery, kayaking, swimming …

You should only put keywords on relevant pages. So put the the name of the town or county on the home page and the location page. Put the activity on the home page and the page for the relevant activity.

Don’t be a keyword stuffer! This is the practice of shoving as many of the keywords as possible on every page. This did  previously work in getting pages ranked in search engines, but it doesn’t any more. 

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4. Use Pictures On Your Website

People really like pictures on a website. If you can, get a photographer to take good quality pictures of your premises, your equipment, people enjoying the activities at your centre and your staff helping your customers. Don’t use stock pictures on your website, there often can be something in the stock picture that will let people know its not a picture of your premises. Take pictures of people being active – e.g. a picture of people surfing like the one below is better than people standing around with their surfboard.

6. How To Get Customers To Give Feedback

Good reviews help your website achieve higher search engine rankings. Have a page on your website where customers can leave reviews. Or email them and ask them for feedback. If it is good feedback ask their permission to put it up on your website. You could add a feedback form to your website. How you do this depends on how your website was built. If it was built using WordPress, you could use this tutorial: 

How To Add A Feedback Form To WordPress

Here is an example of a website which has  feedback (at the bottom right of the page): HYMB Adventure Centre .

7. How To Create Original Content On Your Website

You should describe what is unique about your activity centre. Ask yourself the following questions to get some ideas about what is unique about your activity centre.

• What  activities do you offer?  
• Do you have indoor and outdoor facilities?
• Do you cater for all ages?
• Do you cater for particular groups like stag and hen parties?
• Do you offer corporate events like team building?
• Have your staff special qualifications?
• Has your centre received any awards?
• Do you cater for national/secondary schools etc?
• Do you serve food onsite?
• Do you have a shop onsite?
• Do you cater for birthday parties?
• Do you offer special packages for occasions like Fathers day, bank holidays etc?

Make sure that people that visit your website know what you are offering that is different to other activity centres.

8. How To Build Links To Other Websites

While you need to have good content on your website about your business, it is also important to have links to other businesses on your website.

If your suppliers have websites, agree that you will link to their websites, and they will link to yours.

Provide links to other amenities in the area e.g. If your activity centre is in the Lake District, put links on your site to Dove Cottage, Lake Windermere Cruises.

Provide links to local tourism bodies e.g. Lake District National Park .

Provide links to articles on online sites like Trip Advisor and Lonely Planet about things to do in the local area.

9. How To Lay Out Your Content Well

• Use H1, H2, H3 tags where appropriate.
• Ensure your content is formatted well and easy to read quickly.
• Break the text down into easy to read, short paragraphs. Vary the sentence length in the paragraphs
• Use images and/or videos to break up the text.
• Use nor more than three colors for the text or headings
• Use no more than three fonts for the text or headings.

10. How To Start A Blog

One of the main things that search engines link on web pages is updated content. This means that there is a good reason for customers to keep returning to your website. A good way of doing this without having to constantly update all of your website is to have a blog page. You can write about anything related to your business e.g. a new activity that you are offering, a new menu, special activities planned for a bank holiday weekend, Summer camps etc.

You need to create a reason for people to return to your website regularly. You do not have to post too often, it could be every week or every couple of weeks. You should post at regular times on certain days of the week so that someone can go to your website on a certain day and expect a new blog entry. 

If you are using WordPress for your site, it is very easy to add a blog. Here is a video to show you how: How to add a blog to your website

If you are not using WordPress, you could download a blogging template and add it to your site. There are many examples here: Free Blogger Templates

Here is an example  of an activity centre that has a nice blog:

Kingswood Centre Blog

That was ten ways to help you to optimize your website. If you found this article useful, why not sign up to receive our free SEO Checklist, a quick checklist to see if your website is optimized.

There are several websites which will check how well your webpage is optimised. Here is a good site to start  with: SEO SiteCheckUp.  Why not enter your website now and see what score you get? Then follow the guidelines in this post, update your website, and see how much your score improves.