SEO or search engine optimization is one of the most important elements in increasing any business’ ROI online. The truth is that search isn’t only a mere Q&A platform nowadays; it already has a significant and crucial impact on your customers’ journey. That’s why all business owners and marketers could benefit from being concerned about it.
Several marketing statistics have shown that organic search engine optimization is better than paid search ads, especially since up to 80% of search engine users already focus on organic results.
This article has compiled simple fixes to improve your SEO in 2020-2021. Read on below to learn more.
1. Improve Page Loading Speed for Better SEO
We advise business owners to first look at a company website’s performance in terms of its loading speed. Page loading speed is the time duration when a visitor requests a URL from a search engine by typing it directly or through any other third-party referral site. When a page is being loaded by users, it’s referred to as ‘visited.’
Page loading speed is a factor that should be considered while optimizing your website. Remember that Google and other search engines will recognize if your page load speed is extremely slow, negatively affecting your ranking as a result.
To understand the relevance of web page speed, here are some key points to be kept in mind:
- How fast is the web page loading, and is it smooth?
- Can it load fast, or does it slow down due to too much content and irrelevant information?
- What is the user’s browsing behavior in relation to the page?
- Does the user have difficulty in navigating the page?
When tweaking your website, take note of the kind of user you intend to target. One user may have a different browsing behavior from another. Some of them may be faster than others, so you need to optimize the website while keeping this in mind. Keeping a tab on user behavior is important. Otherwise, the way your visitors engage with your pages will be impacted.
Also, you need to keep the user’s interest alive by providing useful and engaging content, making them hold their attention and stay longer on your site. Keep an eye on the website user behavior so that your website’s abandonment rate won’t increase.
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Some other key points which need to be kept in mind while designing websites include:
- Making the page content appear attractive and user-friendly.
- Having a good visual design that keeps the user’s attention intact.
- The use of a dynamic web page layout and not a static one.
Another critical factor that needs to be kept in mind while designing a website is to keep the usability aspect. For example, if a person wants to navigate quickly through your website, the layout and navigation features should be kept simple. Some webmasters provide a helpful sitemap which aids the users to navigate easily through the site.
2. Publishing High-Quality Content will Improve SEO
You may be thinking that you can just plug in various keywords on your site. But know that, great web content isn’t just about inserting keywords. It’s also about how your words match up with those of your competitors. In fact, if you’re writing content that appeals to a niche group that already has a strong interest in your products or services, your chances of success are more significant because people who buy from you will already know who you are and what you do.
Once you’ve created high-quality web content, it’s also vital to keep it fresh. There’s a reason you need to think about your words as ‘content’ as it’s the thing people find useful. If you want people to share your articles and blog posts, you need to provide them with information that’s current and relevant to their lives. While those details could be challenging to readily determine, just remember that your content basically needs to be informative and attractive, and not sound like a mere sales pitch. Thus, always update your content because people crave for updated information now more than ever.
In the time of talking about content in his recent interview as Ben Austin, the CEO of Absolute Digital Media, mentioned, “Potential customers may also start trusting you based on the way you respond to their questions through your content.” As he elaborates more, “In other words, the content on your website should be relevant, recent, and of high quality.”
You need to provide visitors a good reason to keep on coming back to your site. More traffic means increased popularity for your website. Also, if a site has exciting, fresh, and newsworthy information, your dwell time will rise. When Google Chrome browsers bookmark your website because of relevant and high-quality content, your SEO rankings will improve.
3. Optimize Your Website Images Can Improve SEO
Image optimization can be described as ensuring your photos and images are of the right size and type while considering that the files be kept as small in size as possible without sacrificing image quality. This enables the website to load content more quickly and effectively without making users wait.
Optimization happens by using image-editing software to optimize changes to image files. This means that by optimizing these images, you ensure that your web pages load quicker. It provides users with the most accurate image experience. Note that you can also use keywords strategically in the title, caption, or description of your website images.
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4. Break Up Content with Header Tags for Better SEO
A content header tag has many important functions, usually serving as a starting point for your readers. Headers can be used for any type of article content and don’t always mean that the text within the header is a link. Many times, you’ll find two separate header texts at the beginning and end of an article. They’re generally displayed to make it easier for the reader to distinguish between the two.
There are three types of headers useful for content:
- The header with no name allows the reader to immediately identify your article as an article. It will also help in the search engine ranking.
- The header with a name is a link to a particular page on the website. Once the reader has reached the page, the title will provide more information about the content of the article.
- The header with a title is the third kind. Explore if it’s useful to tandem with any or both of the first two types, since using only one header is advised as not sufficient.
Try using Helvetica, Arial, and other lighter fonts for headers to create a professional appearance. Avoid using dark fonts as these won’t only look bad but also create an image of a dull page. If you choose to use bold fonts for your header tags, ensure that they have correct spelling and grammar to establish and maintain a positive reputation. You can also make use of subheadings which have different sections and which provide more useful information.
5. Using Outbound Links can Improve Your SEO
Outbound links (also referred to as backlinks) bring a reader to another website. Usually, webmasters use this type of link to support various information and to link back to specific pages for content promotion. It’s common knowledge that most websites or blogs don’t have very many backlinks because the vast majority of the time, they’re trying to drive as much traffic to their site as possible. As its name implies, outbound links could ‘tempt’ customers to click away from their site.
However, blogs are also starting to see the importance of backlinks these days, especially in the field of SEO. Many sites offer ways for people to generate backlinks to their site, though not all of these backlinks are effective. Some people use article marketing to generate such backlinks, but this strategy has a tendency to backfire, as people who are submitting their content to article directories will often leave out relevant keywords. These keywords could be the key to attracting the right people to your article, so they should always be handled well.
Meanwhile, other people use pay-per-click advertising, which involves purchasing ad space on a search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN. However, as with the keyword feedback, many people have said that their campaigns failed because the advertiser neglected to focus on essential search terms that the search engines use to index webpages.
Whatever approach you choose, you should remember that you want to have as many outbound links as possible pointing to your site. When you’re optimizing your blog, you should also use these same methods of backlink building. One way to find out how many outbound links you need to submit is to look at your site map and find links to other blogs.
6. Optimize Your Website for Mobile to Improve SEO Performance
There are plenty of reasons why you should optimize your website for mobile devices, and most of them come down to the fact that it’s more cost-effective than traditional site design. The good thing about optimizing for mobile is that you can reach more people with a smaller budget because almost every person owns a mobile device nowadays. However, you should also realize that the market for websites is changing, which means your website needs to keep up, stay competitive, and be relevant in this rapidly changing world.
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Conclusion
SEO isn’t one of those fads that are going to phase out after some time. As a website or business owner, you have to concentrate on it today and in the future. It’s not too late to implement all the different SEO fixes discussed above. Start with a few before moving on to the others, so you don’t get overwhelmed.
