Across the world, people are using the Internet to browse through 200 million active websites, which means it’s a tough challenge to stand out in the vast ocean of the Internet. For business websites and blogs, this can be a huge problem. After all, no matter how aesthetically pleasing or functional your site may be, your target audience still needs to find it first before they’re able to interact with your brand online.
There are two ways to go about boosting your website’s visibility—pay-per-click or SEO. You can either pay Google to list your page at the top of their search engine results page (SERP) for certain keywords, or you can attract more organic traffic through SEO or search engine optimization strategies and high-quality content.
The concept of SEO has been around back in the late 1990’s, since Google became the most popular search engine in the world. Through the implementation of good SEO techniques, search engines like Google are able to “crawl” and find out what your website is all about. This way, when a user has a query that your website can answer, your site will appear on the SERP organically without needing to pay for the opportunity. This is why top companies all over the world regularly use professional to boost their online presence and visibility.
That said, everyone with a website can improve their visibility through simple changes that have a huge positive impact on their SERP ranking. Here are just a few SEO best practices that you can apply to your website immediately:
Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
When search engines turn up search results, the first things users will see are the title tags and meta descriptions of a website. These short bits of text provide the first impression to the user, letting them know if your website is what they are looking for. As such, it’s crucial to write compelling and keyword-rich titles and descriptions.
In creating accurate title tags and meta descriptions, do note that there are certain limitations such as maximum character counts. Within those limits, you must create a short description that’s concise, relevant, and compelling enough to encourage users to click through to your website.
Improve Page Load Speed
When it comes to SEO, every millisecond counts. With technology improving every day, people are now used to super-fast website loading times of 2.5 to 4 seconds or even shorter. Any slower than this would be considered sluggish.
A slow-loading website will frustrate visitors and will also get penalized by search engines by pushing it down in SERPs. To ensure you avoid these scenarios, optimize your website by minimizing image sizes, leveraging browser caching, and cleaning up code.
Use Descriptive URLs
A website’s address or URL (uniform resource locator) used to be made up of random strings of alphanumeric and special characters. Nowadays, URLs are phrases or even whole sentences that describe the page. With search engines paying more attention to websites with helpful, descriptive links, you have to make sure to implement this change as well.
Opt for clean, readable URLs that accurately reflect the subject of the page. Not only does this enhance SEO, but it also improves user experience and makes your website more shareable.
Optimize Multimedia Content
Beyond making your website more aesthetically pleasing, images and videos also play a crucial role in SEO. Make sure to optimize these media content by using descriptive filenames and alt tags that include relevant keywords.
In addition, it’s wise to compress images and videos wisely to reduce file size without compromising quality. This will speed up page load times, which, as previously mentioned, is a critical factor in SEO. Finally, you can enhance accessibility and improve your website’s overall visibility by making your images and videos SEO-friendly. This means adding key details like metadata, title tags, captions, and subtitles as needed.
Update Your Content Regularly
Fresh, relevant content is the lifeblood of SEO. As such, you need to regularly update your website with new blog posts, articles, or product updates. All of these send signals to search engines that your site is active, informative, and most of all, helpful to users. An ongoing effort to keep your website up-to-date demonstrates to both users and search engines your expertise and commitment to providing value.
Link to Relevant Internal Pages
Another important SERP factor that’s often neglected is internal linking. This is when you include links to other pages in your website in your new content. It’s as simple as inserting links to related pages. If your newest blog is talking about the latest camera models, you can add a link to an older blog about lenses.
Doing this not only improves the overall user experience and strengthens the authority of individual pages, but also signals to search engines the interconnectedness of your content.
Fix Broken Links and Redirects
Broken links are links on a web page that leads to a resource that no longer exists. Meanwhile, redirects are links that lead to different links than the one requested by the user. Both of these can hinder user experience and SEO efforts.
To fix these issues, use SEO tools to conduct regular audits to identify and fix broken links throughout your website. Implement 301 redirects for any broken or outdated URLs to ensure a smooth user journey and preserve link equity. With a healthy link profile, you can prevent potential penalties from search engines and maintain the integrity of your website.
While major SEO overhauls can be daunting at first, implementing these small changes can yield significant improvements in your website’s search engine ranking. Be proactive and agile when it comes to website improvements. In doing so, you can watch your website soar to new heights despite the competitiveness of the online market.