It’s unfortunate that SEO for most sites is done after a site has been built. Designers, bless their creative hearts, don’t often focus on SEO or know enough about it to really care. The good news is that there are many aspects to improving SEO that can be implemented without affecting site design.
While much of what Google uses to rank pages will remain unknown we can use the ones that we do know to take action. Here are 10 elements that you can audit and fix right now to improve your visibility in the SERPs.
#1 Content
Successful site SEO begins with a multitude of great content. Four and five page websites at the top of the SERPs are no more so create lots of good content to get quality links.
You can get more information about the importance of content marketing for your website here.
#2 Canonicalization
Having multiple versions of your site is never a good thing. Redirect the non-www version of your site to the www version if you need to in order to increase the number of links pointing to one page. This will do wonders for your ranking.
#3 Title Tags
Write your title tags to let the search engines know what the page is about. The search engines display 70 characters, use them, it’s as simple as that.
#4 URL Structure
Are you still using dynamic URLs for your site? It’s time to change them, don’t make it harder for the search engines to index your pages.
#5 Internal Linking
Internal linking will give your website a synergy that you’ll find no where. Give as much as you can of links to your online property from other pages or posts on your website to create a highly detailed map, to the point that the visitor find your content more interesting that any other website on the world wide web.
Internal linking is important and effective if you can do it the right way.
#6 Site Speed Optimization
Sites with faster loading times will be given preference in the SERPs, this according to Google. Take steps to improve site speed and see a definite increase in ranking. You may think about checking your hosting performance to notice how fast your website is.
#7 Social Integration
Add some social buttons on your sites in order to improve social signals. As an added bonus you just might increase the traffic that you get from these social sites.
Apart of adding social buttons, social media marketing is very crucial for your website and it’s optimization for the visitor and the search engines. You can find a detailed guide on how to use social medial marketing for businesses and more information here.
#8 Image Alt Attribute
Help the search engines and people with visual disabilities see your images the way they should by using Alt attributes on your images. Finding a creative way to incorporate a keyword into the attribute might help to secure some ranking benefits as well. After the penguin update introduced by Google, image search results is dominated and give more credit to the search engine than the image owner, by we still can do something about it!
#9 Custom 404 Error Pages
Custom 404 error pages will keep visitors and search spiders on your website when they cannot find a page. Your 404 page will have a navigation that they can use to find what they need instead of leaving right away.
#10 XML Sitemap
If you’ve built a large website over time and don’t have the best navigational structure an XML sitemap will help Google find and index pages. There have been debates on the value of these sitemaps but since it is easy to setup in WordPress there is no reason not to make use of them.
Are you interested on more information about search engines optimization? You may find what you are seeking for here.
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