Many people believe that SEO is hard but this is not true. Basic SEO configurations are very easy to implement and sometimes this is all you need to do to for maximum exposure on all major search engines.
If you are looking for a quick guide with simple but yet effective SEO tips then you are on the right page, read on!
1. Optimize your titles, URL and descriptions
This is probably the oldest tip in the SEO industry but it is still the most important. Add a meaningful title and related description for your page.
2. Provide useful and fresh content
One of the reasons you have a website or blog is to provide content to build an audience, keep your existing readers happy or gain new customers. By content we mean anything from articles, videos, infographics, slideshows, music, comments, reviews or anything else that is suited for your niche.
If your content is static, old or out of date then most probably your visitors will go away quickly and never come back. What is your first reaction when you visit a website that has out-of-date content? It’s exactly the same as the users visiting your website.
A couple of years ago we used to say to our clients that updating was not a very important SEO factor but this has changed due to the competition. There is big competition in every keyword you search and those websites that have the most useful and fresh content have more chances of winning the race.
3. Improve your website’s loading time
If this is the first time you are reading that page speed is important for SEO then soon after reading this post you should do whatever is needed to improve the loading time of your website. If you have read about this before and have not yet done anything about it, you are doing a big mistake.
Because this is important I will keep it simple:
Page speed is a ranking factor – if you have two similar websites and the one is faster than the other, you can expect that it will also rank higher (provided that other things are equal).
Faster websites generate more conversions – This means more sales, more RSS subscribers and more clicks on your ads (if you are using Adsense for example).
More page views – When a website loads fast users are likely to visit more than one page before they leave.
How can you improve the speed of your website? I know that it is not an easy task especially if you are not a technical person but it is important to handle page speed without further delays.
When working on clients websites page speed is among the first things we handle and the results in terms of conversions are sometimes immediate.
If you cannot afford to hire an SEO or a developer to make your web site load faster, what you can do is the following:
- Remove big images
- Remove unnecessary JavaScript files
- Use sprites instead of small images to minimize http redirects
- Move to a faster Web hosting provider
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service
- Use these resources from Google for more tips and tools
4. Implement Google updates
When Google introduces a new feature that is related to their search results, you have to follow their path without delay. The good news is that Google rich snippets is a feature very useful to the searches as well because:
- Structured data markup describes things on the web, along with their properties. For example, if your site has recipes, you could use markup to describe properties for each recipe, such as the summary, the URL to a photo for the dish, and its overall rating from users.
When you provide structured data markup for your online content, you make that content eligible to appear in two categories of Google Search features:
- Rich results—Structured data for things like recipes, articles, and videos can appear in Rich Cards, as either a single element or a list of items. Other kinds of structured data can enhance the appearance of your site in Search, such as with Breadcrumbs, or a Sitelinks Search Box.
- Knowledge Graph cards—If you’re the authority for certain content, Google can treat the structured data on your site as factual and import it into the Knowledge Graph, where it can power prominent answers in Search and across Google properties. Knowledge Graph cards appear for authoritative data about organizations, and events. Movie reviews, and movie/music play actions, while based on ranking, can also appear in Knowledge Graph cards once they are reconciled to Knowledge Graph entities.
5. Register your website with Google and Bing webmaster tools
Some people believe that by not registering your website with Google you can ‘hide’ things from them and slip under their radar and reach the top of the search results. This is not a ‘hide and seek’ game, good long term rankings can only be achieved if you follow valid methods and techniques. For the record: Google already knows everything they need to know about your website with or without submitting it to webmaster tools.
Once you go through the registration process and perform some basic configurations you will get notified if there is a problem with your website and also start looking at some interesting facts about your website like:
- Number of index pages
- Number of incoming links
- Search queries
- Crawl errors
- Number of internal links
Conclusion
The above 5 tips are simple but at the same time they are also very important. If you are running a blog, ecommerce store or content driven website and you are not getting traffic from search engines, then you need to ensure that you have implemented the above 5 tips correctly.
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