If you often read our blog, you may have already realized that there are many ways to optimize your website. Veterans of the industry tend to focus on the trendiest and most revolutionary digital marketing innovations.
These are all well and good, but let's not forget, you need to crawl before you can walk. Here are some of the core essentials you need to effectively optimize your website.
An important question to ask yourself is: how long do the images, on my website, take to load on the screens of my visitors? If your images are too big to load at a reasonable speed, all that money spent on a fancy graphics designer may have been spent in vain.
We wouldn’t put up with this in a store downtown: imagine entering a bakery and being completely ignored by the person behind the counter; now consider what you would do if you could click your fingers and instantly be transported to another bakery where the service is good; of course, you wouldn’t hesitate to click.
This is exactly the feeling for every user visiting a site that doesn’t load. This is also an important issue for search engines: Google prefers websites with quick load times. Especially as 53% of mobile site visitors will go somewhere else if a website takes longer than three seconds to load.
Optimizing images correctly may be the difference between you getting the ranking you want or not. Checking the load speed is not as simple as clicking on your website and timing it yourself; you will not get an authentic consumer perspective from doing this.
If you have visited your website before, your computer has already saved elements of it in the browser. This means it loads faster for you than for first-time visitors. Therefore, this would not be a realistic representation.
To get a more realistic idea of this experience, use apps such as rankingCoach. This will give you detailed reports on your website’s optimization status and show you the areas in need of improvement.
Size is not the only visual aspect you should consider. As you may know, you have the chance to include some explanatory keywords in the metadata. This is very useful for appearing among Google Images Results, as well as for making sure Google understands what your posts are about.
You can include keywords in the title of the image and the so-called “alt text”. You must pay attention to both of them and make sure they are properly optimized for the search terms you are interested in.
Remember, you need to do as much as you can to optimize your website. Google compares your website with its competitors and there is just one place at the top of the results.
Including as many keywords as possible in the website text, is a well-known tactic for optimizing your website, but you must take care with this. You especially need to avoid keyword stuffing and adding irrelevant terms, since the top search engines see this as cheating.
If you do this, It is very likely that you will be caught and that your website will, as a result, suffer in the rankings. In the early days of Google, pages were valued in terms of how many keywords they had.
Nowadays, search engines are much more sophisticated; they can detect when a website is overloaded with irrelevant keywords. You can still use keywords but make sure that this does not consist of more than 5% of your text.
Also, make sure you write naturally and that your content makes sense to your visitors. If it doesn’t, they will certainly notice and so will Google!
If a page of your website has the same written content as another page, internal or external, the search engines will penalize it. They do not like duplicate content, so you should focus on avoiding this common practice.
Creating new content or rephrasing interesting sections from other sources is a much better option. Obviously, you shouldn’t literally copy and paste content from other sources.
Duplicate content may also occur in different product pages offering the same products. It’s common to see the same descriptions for similar products on e-commerce sites. We suggest writing fresh new content for each of the products or services you offer online.
Content is the basis of your website optimization. Consequently, you must work hard to create long and natural content that is keyword-rich. The length of your content is an important consideration for search engines.
They give preferential ranking to web pages including more than 1000 words. Furthermore, the more substantial and interesting your content is, the longer that your visitors will remain on your website.
This is also a key factor in Google’s placement of your website in the rankings. Of course, this 1000 words rule doesn’t apply equally to all websites.
If you have subpages for your products, it is difficult to write reviews about them with more than 1000 words; Nevertheless, as long as the content sounds natural, you should create reviews and descriptions that are as long as possible to give more value to your site.
In other cases, you might be interested in writing 4000 words posts. In the end, the length of your content is related to what you communicate.
Creating links from your website to others to widen the information you are offering is a very useful practice for you and your visitors. This way, you don’t need to create more content than necessary and your visitors can get in-depth information about a specific topic.
This tactic is also well thought of by Google. The area of attention for outbound links is with dead-links: If the links to your website are out of date because the URL has been modified, it turns your links into portals to error messages.
Unsurprisingly, this is not good for your website or your search engine rankings, so you might want to check those outbound links from time to time to avoid this
If just keeping up to date with the core elements of SEO seems like a lot to do by yourself, you might want to get some help. rankingCoach offers an all-in-one digital solution for businesses and young entrepreneurs looking to compete with the best of them.