You could have built the best looking and functioning website in the history of websites. But it wouldn’t really matter, if no one visited it.
You should optimize your website for search engines (SEO) if you want visitors to find your site. Search engine optimization is the process that webmasters implement to make their sites more likely to rank better in search engines. Your website should be optimized to appear on the first page of a search engine’s results after a person types in a search term. We’ve compiled a list of some essential SEO tips that you should definitely know about and make use of to get better rankings.
1. Create an Effective Website
A sitemap is important if you have a new, large, or multimedia-focused site. This file provides information to search engines so they can index and crawl web pages, videos, and audio in an efficient manner. Google provides an excellent sitemap generator. So does Bing. If you want to get your website listed in Google News, you must have a sitemap.
Moreover, your site should be encouraging users to access and share its content with others. Sell anything? At the very least, your homepage should contain a few images of optimized products. Do you have a blog? Make sure you link to your most recent posts. This increases traffic and appeals to search engines as well. These factors are indicators of your priorities.
When searching for a website, the title field should boil down the website to its name and certain relevant keywords. Make sure you select your website’s name and keywords carefully so you can attract people and search engines alike.
Finally, don’t ignore the importance of creating an attractive website. Visitors will leave a GeoCities-like site, and search for a competitor who looks more professional. So you end up losing traffic, visitors and revenue.
2. Choose a Specific Topic to Discuss
People want authoritative and accurate results from search engines. Consequently, your website’s content should demonstrate your expertise in any subject area you wish to explore. Do you write recipes? If so, your website should be focused on food. Avoid mixing food content with metalworking, for instance. There’s no reason for your website to be a global corporation or a large news outlet that needs to appeal to everyone.
The importance of specificity cannot be understated. You should have a website dealing with fly fishing instead of deep-sea angling, if you are a fisherman with an excellent perspective on fly fishing. Your web presence will benefit if you focus on your strengths.
3. Pick Keywords that are Relevant
Picking keywords for your site is easier when you have a focused topic. The best way to use keywords on your website is to summarize the various elements of your website in SEO-friendly language, such as articles, images, videos, and podcasts. Keywords should also be present in your site’s URL, header tag, meta description, and alt attribute. The terms can be placed directly in your website’s backend (if you use a website builder) or edited by editing code (for those who prefer to enter the backend of their web hosting service and tweak the HTML).
The keywords you choose should match the searches of people. When you have a website selling hand knitted scarves, your keywords should be “scarf” and “knitting.” When you perform a search with those words, other websites will come up. Hence, you should use long-tail keywords to complement standard keywords, as they are more specific.
According to our example previously, a relevant and long-tail keyword is “best woolen Dinosaur scarves”. That’s an incredibly specific search that will help you distinguish yourself from the crowd. You can find strong keywords with Google’s Keyword Planner tool. Don’t go too obscure, however; your search engine optimization should avoid using keywords few people enter.
4. Consistently Produce Quality Content
SEO takes into account content quality as well. A blog about cars, for example, should address questions or provide information about niche topics. Rather than go on about general things for too much time, you should present articles that are packed with specific information.
Fresh, changing content is prioritized by search engines. Avoid copying and pasting content from other sites. It will negatively affect your search engine ranking. Make sure your content is original and high-quality.
A consistent stream of new articles, art, and products should be added to your website. A reason for visitors to return to your website or to share your content on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is critical. Fresh content is also attractive to search engine spiders.
In order to build valuable authority, it is necessary to establish off-site links. Those aforementioned social media networks and other highly trafficked websites can link to your site, which is what search engines look for. In the event you gain a link from The NY Times to your site, search engines will consider your site noteworthy and increase its search ranking.
This can’t be done artificially, however. Knowledge is power, so make sure to put it front and center, make sure it is clearly presented, and keep your website updated. You will eventually gain SEO traction if you provide information that people crave. Keep your blog content optimized as well.
5. Image Optimization
Using images on the web is like coloring within the lines; good looking images make a website appear more inviting. In addition to that, images make it easier for your reader to focus on the product or service that you are promoting. It is important that you optimize your images.
Shrinking down your images to a manageable size is the first step in optimizing them for web use. If your page is image-heavy, try to keep the size of each image under a megabyte. Use JPG or WEBP formats and resize images to 1920 by 1080 pixels or higher for fast loading. Slow-loading sites do not perform well in search engine results.
Don’t forget to include proper Alt attributes for your images. Google cannot see your site’s pictures, but its Alt attribute helps it categorize them. A description of the image should be included in the alt attribute, but should not be too long. You should aim for no more than 125 characters.
6. Faster Website Loading
A Google study found that 53 percent of mobile audiences abandon a site after three seconds if it takes longer than that to load. Slow-loading websites will cause users to bounce, so don’t waste their time.
Test My Site, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Pingdom are all excellent tools for analyzing your site’s speed. You can use these tools to see what can be done to improve the load time of your website. Scripts or images that are slow to load can be replaced.
Any plugins that aren’t essential to your site should be removed from WordPress. A WordPress plug-in called WP-Rocket can also help you load pages faster.
7. Create informative meta descriptions
Meta descriptions, or snippets, are small paragraphs that appear within the HTML code for every one of your pages. The meta description appears below the page title in search engine results and explains the purpose of the page in more detail.
You can drop the meta description in the “Head” section of each page if you’re comfortable with HTML editing.
Meta descriptions can often be edited without digging into HTML in content management systems. When you use WordPress, you can add meta descriptions without worrying about coding thanks to plug-ins such as All in One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO.
Conclusion
The top 7 SEO tips listed here are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to search engine optimization, but they’re helpful to get you started. You need to be patient in applying these tips to your website if you want it to rank well on Bing, Google, and other search engines.
