For many website owners, SEO is a maze of confusing and conflicting advice, obscure tech-porn protocols, and voodoo-like code. Yet a search engine like Google is typically where your website’s engagement with potential visitors begins. Your business needs to be visible at the moment a potential customer is searching online for a business just like yours.
Hence, you need to fine-tune your website to ensure it matches the latest needs of Google’s ever-evolving search engine algorithm.
Beyond Keywords
Search engine algorithms not only rate keyword relevance on web pages, and in your meta data, to terms user’s search for, but they also consider user experience and overall usability of your website including:
- Time visitors spend on your site
- Pages viewed
- Broken links
- Bounce rate
- Inbound and outbound links
So how do you tweak your website to transform it into a lead generating machine? The answer lies in adopting the following six simple SEO tips, guaranteed to boost your website ranking.
1. Content Is Compelling So Write For Your Visitors, Not For Soulless Search Engines
Your website’s ability to attract visitors and keep them exploring the site depends greatly on the quality of your content. No point generating epic traffic volumes if they bounce straight off your website. Here’s some ways to help improve your content to make it suitable for visitors and not search engines.
- Create personas to provide a focus on the audience you’re writing for.
- Don’t be afraid to evolve a unique voice that appeals to your audience and authentically brings your brand to life.
- Engage your audience by asking them questions, offering them free downloads and asking them to subscribe to email or newsletter lists.
- Write on topics they want to hear about. You can check Google search bar to see what people have been searching for.
- Make sure the content is free from spelling and grammar mistakes as this can make you appear unprofessional.
2. Adopt Friendly URLs For WebPages
Friendly URLs include keywords in your content link and improving both the website visitor experience and your SEO ranking by making the links easy to read and easy to understand. Why adopt friendly URLs?
- Keywords in the URL help confirm to visitors seeing your URL on social media, in an email or hovering on a link that they're getting what they’re looking for
- The URL serves as an anchor text if the URL is copied and pasted without including an anchor text in the link.
- Keywords in the URL are displayed in search results, and the URL is one of the most considered searching elements when selecting which site to click through to.
So, take the opportunity to enhance your visitor experience and improve your SEO performance by including keywords in your URL. As seen from the image below the keyword is ‘How To Build A Deck’. The first example features the keyword in the URL, while the second one doesn’t. This makes the first one more appealing because it features the exact search results in the URL.
3. Include Text And Filenames With Images
- Contemporary website templates emphasize an engaging combination of clean design and evocative images. So, why incorporate Alternative text?
- It allows the content and image function to be accessible to those with visual or certain cognitive disabilities.
- Provides semantic meaning to images, which can be read by search engines or used to determine the image content from page context alone.
Leverage the power of your rich image content to improve your SEO by:
- Naming your images using easy-to-understand descriptions. For example: blueskythinking.jpg
- Avoiding numerical fine name conventions such as img0098762.jpg.
- Including Alternative text describing the image.
- Using a tool like Varvy SEO or ContentForest to identify images lacking alternative text.
4. Declare War On Clone Titles and Descriptions
Adopting standard templates saves development time and money when building a website. However, if you copy a page directly across and clone it, often its title and description are also duplicated. Duplication confuses search engine algorithms and this impacts your search rankings. How do you stop this?
- Validate your new website pages
- Rename new pages and refresh their descriptions
- Use a tool such as Copyscape.com, Siteliner or Serpstat to discover duplicated
5. Rev Up Your Page Load Speed
Your page load speed is one of the factors incorporated into both Google and Bing’s page ranking algorithm. Visitors are notoriously impatient. A one second delay can result in:
- Fewer page views
- A decrease in customer satisfaction
- A loss in conversions
Similarly:
- It’s expected for a website to load within 2-3 seconds.
- If a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, visitors will abandon their search of your website.
- Loyalty of a website may improve with faster loading times.
The implication is clear, making your visitors wait for a page to load spikes your bounce rate, punishes your dwell time and reduces the number of pages a visitor is likely to view. Address your page load by:
- Checking your page speed with one of the many free online tools available
- Integrating a caching plug-in
- Ensuring your website code is streamlined
- Optimizing the size of the images on your website
- Reducing the number of plug-ins
- Minimizing page redirects
6. Be Mobile-Friendly
Mobile is about to make the jump into hyperspace from a descriptive to a generic term. Mobile consumptionand usage continue to surge as smartphones and tablets propel the growth of organic search. Search engines such as Google and Bing are awarding higher rankings to mobile-friendly websites. Because of this it’s important to validate your website’s performance using the Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Last Word
If you’re looking to climb the Google rankings mountain, avoiding common mistakes many websites make when setting up or updating their site. Follow these simple tips and watch a flood of free organic traffic flow into your website as your SEO ranking soars. Are you ready to improve your website ranking?
Bill Sheikh is the founder of U-Thrive Marketing, Tulsa's premier online marketing and website development firm. He has helped hundreds of businesses across Oklahoma and other part of the with online marketing services.
