Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is nothing new but it is increasingly important when it comes to increasing your website traffic. With so many different sites out there, you want to make sure that the right search terms lead potential customers right to your site. You want your website to appear in those top search results.
When it comes to making sure that your site is optimized for search traffic, there are multiple parts of your website that can be modified.
Increasing the amount of traffic on your site is easy—as long as you’re putting the right SEO strategies in place. Here are five factors you’ll want to consider.
The speed of your website
How fast website pages load is one of the algorithms that Google uses to rank sites. Slow sites are harder to crawl—which means if your site doesn’t load quickly, you could rank lower on searches.
Ideally, all pages on your site will load in under three seconds. There are online tools that will determine how quickly your site loads. If you find your site is slow, take the necessary steps to begin improving your speed.
Two of the quickest ways to improve speed is compressing images on your site and cleaning up code. You may also need to upgrade to a better web host. You can find a good web hosting service with this comparison.
Server Location
One thing that can help with the page speed of a website is where the server is located in relation to where the audience of the website are. If you are running a restaurant in London, then your target audience will be people in and around London who are looking for somewhere to eat.
If you are using a web host who has their servers located in the UK, your website should be loading faster than if the server was based in the US. Even though the increase in speed can be measured in milliseconds, it is important that you try and provide the best and faster experience possible to your site visitors. If you are on the lookout for a UK-based web host then Mangomatter listed the best UK hosts on their website, so take a look there. If you are located in Australia take a look at this Australian comparison on Hosting Foundry.
Whether a blog could help
If done correctly, a blog is a great way to help organically improve your ranking. However, there is a right and a wrong way to blog. If you spam your blog with irrelevant content and poorly written posts, you could hurt your ranking.
When it comes to blogs, here are a few quick tips. You’ll want to produce content that is relevant to your industry. You’ll want to use keywords in your title tag, headers, URL, and meta descriptions.
You’ll also want to make sure you’re ready for the commitment. You should be updating your blog once or twice a week. Frequent updates will allow you to generate more traffic to your site.
Is your site mobile-friendly
You might already be aware of the importance of having your site be mobile-friendly. More people access the internet from their phones or tablets than they do computers. A mobile-friendly site will automatically reformat itself based on the device.
Mobile-friendly sites mean that all visitors can use your site as intended. Not only does this improve user experience, but it could also boost your SEO. Some search engines have algorithms in place that prioritize mobile-friendly sites.
If you’re not sure whether or not your site is mobile-friendly, try accessing it from multiple devices and browsers and see if it is loading correctly. If it doesn’t, it is time to improve your web design.
Are links utilized correctly
Quality link building is another way to boost your ranking. Similar to blogging, there are good ways and bad ways to link build. Sites with backlinks tend to rank higher because it shows that it is a quality site—at the same time, however, you don’t want to spam links.
Backlinks that appear on authoritative websites within your industry will boost your ranking. However, avoid sites that are full of spam content—sites often don’t rank well on Google and won’t help your ranking.
One way to build these backlinks is by offering to write guest blog posts for that site. You can also link internally from your own blog to help boost your rankings.
Keeping an eye on analytics
One of the biggest mistakes is not keeping an eye on your website analytics. These analytics contain valuable information about where your traffic is coming from, what search terms are leading to your site, and the demographics of your audience.
Looking at these analytics can help you determine your next marketing steps. For example, you may discover that there are new keywords that you should be incorporating into your content. Or you may discover you need to spend more time linking content to your social media.
You want to constantly be looking for ways to improve the traffic to your website. Analytics can help you figure out what is (or isn’t) working.
In summary
SEO can be tricky but if you start being more strategic and finding ways to improve your practices, you can start ranking higher on search engines.
Start by considering how your web host and website design could be impacting your SEO. Then, start being more strategic with your content, links, and analytics.
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