ASP's Dan Pacitti and Max Your Web's Jon Monk give their top SEO tips for making your event website search engine friendly. 

1. Know your target keywords
Dan says: “The single biggest issue with most websites is that they are not targeting the best keywords for their business.

“The right keywords are the terms that your target market is typing into Google to look for products and services that you offer”.

2. Optimise the meta titles on your primary pages

Jon says: “The meta title is the main line of each listing in Google's search results, and is very important to optimise.

“This is the first thing that people see that should be highly relevant to their search. It is also given a great deal of weight by Google.

“You therefore need to make sure the meta titles on all your primary pages have been optimised to the top keywords that page is targeting”.

3. Improve your homepage
Dan says: “Your homepage is the most important page on your website, as it is the page that typically gets the most visitors, and will be the one that Google sees first.

“It should therefore contain all the information your visitors would expect to see on a home page, as well as a logical route into all your sites pages”.

Step 1 - Review the home pages for all your top Google competitors to help find your homepage target keywords.

Step 2 - Take inspiration from your competitors' websites, but then make your homepage a little better than theirs.
Step 3 - Write your content (optimised for your target keyword), and then implement all updates.

4. Check you don't have duplicate or low quality content
Jon says: “Google does not like websites with many duplicated or low quality pages. It is only looking to index good quality pages that add value to their visitors.

“Review your website with a tool like Screaming Frog to assess if you have a lot of these pages. If you do, then you need to tell Google not to index these pages by adding the 'noindex' tag”.

5. Harness the power of questions

Dan says: “As humans, we are constantly asking ourselves and other people questions, and this extends to the web. Your website should simply be answering your target market's questions.

“Here’s how you do it:”

Step 1 - Define your target keyword for a specific web page.
Step 2 - Type that keyword into Google and view the 'People Also Ask' section in the search results for relevant Q&A's suggested by Google.
Step 3 - Put your keyword into a tool like Keyword Keg and this will also suggest more questions.
Step 4 - Pick the most relevant questions for your web page and write these up, and add to the page.

Jon’s Bonus tip: “If you add FAQ Schema code to these, then they will possibly show up in the Google search results directly, greatly improving your website's exposure!”

For more information on ASP or to request a demo of ASP’s industry-leading Content Management System, email hello@asp.events.