The internet is this vast public marketplace where millions of products and services are offered every second and there’s always a chance that you’ll be trampled underfoot by other stronger, bolder competitors that offer pretty much the same thing/s that you do.
That is unless you have all the tools that you can get your hands on in order to get to the top and to stay there as much and as long as possible.
One of your biggest and best tools to do so? SEO.
Why is SEO important?
Image credit: Pexels.com
Search engine optimization, when done correctly, boosts your webpage’s or website’s chances of earning organic or naturally earned, unpaid visits from online users, pushing it higher on a search engine’s results page.
These visits can subsequently turn into clients and customers, leading to possible higher and faster profits and return of investment (ROI).
However, there is one brutal truth about Search Engine Optimization: it involves way more than just having excellent content on your website.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of websites on the internet right now, filled to the brim with useful and/or entertaining content with designs and layouts extremely well-thought of and meticulously applied.
Unfortunately, most site owners fail to utilize up-to-date tips and tricks in order to keep their SEO game sharp and on-point. Frankly, a huge number of them are not quite sure how and where to begin.
Are you one of them?
Fret no more. On this post, you’ll find 7 tips for designing a website that ranks on search.
Basically, these questions lead to the foolproof, no-nonsense guide your website needs in order to rank higher on search engine results.
1. How relevant are your posts to your intended readers?
>Image credit: Pexels.com
With the most popular reason for SEO being to gain more organic fresh and return visits, it’s often easy to lose focus on the quality of the content of the posts being published on particular websites.
However, quality content still is and should always be the number one focus. After all, the best articles and posts are written for users and not just for search engines.
Your website’s content should be directly aimed at your target audience. This will help to improve your site’s relevance, authority and, most importantly, increase site traffic.
Do not be afraid to emphasize your posts using emphasis tags such as bold, italics, headings. On the other hand, using too much can be a bit tedious on the eyes, so use them sparingly.
2. How SEO-friendly is your site URL?
>Image credit: Pexels.com
Aaron Gray, digital marketing expert, provided a clear example in his answer to this Quora question: What are SEO-friendly URLs, and why are they used?
Basically, SEO-friendly URLs should be readable, contain keywords (as opposed to just sporting a series of random, jumbled letters, numbers and characters), short (maximum 60-70 characters), and should try to match the title of the page.
3. Can users quickly and easily navigate through your site?
>Image credit: Pixabay.com
An excellent website should be designed in such a way that it avoids confusing and overwhelming your visitors and makes going through the site an enjoyable and enriching experience.
Aside from having content that resonates with your target audience, making sure that navigating through your website does not become a difficult and complicated process is one of the good ways of encouraging visitors to return.
One way is to use a navigation bar. This is one very common and extremely important part of a website, especially if you want your site to become more engaging for you visitors.
Sitemaps are also extremely important for quick navigation through your website, especially if your site is large and/or contains a big amount of archived content.
Plus, Google will use what you submit on your XML sitemap to determine what may be important on your website. In that case, you must also have vital keywords on your sitemap to serve both purposes.
4. Responsive Web Design – How friendly is your website towards different kinds of devices?
>Image credit: Pixabay.com
Google recommends using responsive web design (RWD) on your website for optimum performance across multiple devices. That means your site’s content should look good on both small-screened smartphones and wide-screen monitors alike. Incorporating an Elementor addon into your design process can further enhance the responsiveness and customization possibilities.
As of now though, because of the wide array of available browsers for both mobile and desktops, there is no single absolute way of doing this.
One huge key to determine how you want to use RWD then is by first knowing what devices your audience most commonly use to access your website.
From there, as you design your website, you can also try accessing it on multiple devices and internet browsers to see what works best.
5. Image Optimisation – How big or small should your images be?
>Image credit: Pixabay.com // Pexels.com
Optimizing your images together with your texts helps your website rank better on search results.
Google’s Ilya Grigorik, web performance engineer and author of High Performance Browsing Network, mentions these fail-proof factors in his image optimization checklist.
- Prefer vector formats
- Minify and compress SVG assets
- Pick best raster image format
- Experiment with optimal quality settings for raster formats
- Remove unnecessary image metadata
- Serve scaled images
- Invest into automated tools and infrastructure to ensure constant and premium image optimisation
6. Site Speed – How fast does your website load up?
Image credit: JeShoots.com // Pexels.com
A recent study shows that 47% of website visitors expect your webpage to load in less than 2 seconds, and an extremely high 57% will leave if it takes 3 seconds or more to load.
Considering how a large part of that 57% could be converted into ROI for you instead, then every second literally counts when it comes to site speed.
Now how do you go about achieving that?
- Size images before uploading them
- Eliminate unnecessary plugins
- Make sure your site’s scripts are up-to-date
- Make use of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks)
- Enable browser caching
- Turn on Gzip compression
- Keep CSS files at the top of your page and Javascript codes at the bottom
Speaking of Javascript, be frugal in using them on your website as they generally do not work well on mobile devices.
Javascript also causes crawling issues for search engines, so using them excessively makes it harder for search engines to read your website.
You’ll also want to read: Tips On How To Create The Best UI/UX For Your Website
7. Social media integration – Have you incorporated social sharing buttons to your site content?
Image credit: Buffer.com
Make sure that your website has quick links to like, share, pin and follow for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram as well as other trending social networking startups.
Plugins are one popular way to do this, and there are hundreds that you can choose from online.
For example, Social Warfare is a popular choice especially for but not limited to WordPress users, as the social sharing buttons it makes look great on all types of webpages accessible via any browser or device. In addition to that, the plugin also automatically displays your share count on each of your chosen SNS, boosting your social proof.
Blogs are another widely used platform to help make website popular. You can also target specific keywords while creating your content, which can help your search engine optimization strategy. If you haven’t started yet, there are a lot of resources online that you can find on how to create a blog.
Use these 7 tips to maximize the advantages that you can get and boost your website all the way to the top.
Written by Kevin Ocasio on Thursday, September 14, 2017
Kevin is a full-time digital marketer and business coach. As a retired marine, he devotes his time helping business owners succeed online.