Get The Most SEO Benefit from Your Website
Search engine optimization follows a stricter set of rules than was the case years ago. In a way, the increased requirements by Google are a good thing. Undeserved sites don’t clutter the results pages. Despite all the changes taking place, many website publishers still follow outdated SEO steps. A typical old-time plan involved only optimizing the landing page. Doing this undercuts the ability to draw a decent amount of traffic. A better strategy consists in optimizing the entire website. This way, all the pages on the site appear prominently in the search engines.
Develop a Consistent and Coherent Theme
Avoid jumping around when creating a website. Optimizing the site for SEO works best when all the pages stay true to the same topic. So, if you create a website about your professional career as a painter, don’t add other pages dealing with your hobby as a surfer. Stick with one topic per site. Mixing up topics means some pages won’t attract the traffic you want. Persons reading about surfing adventures probably won’t pay for any painting services.
Utilize Keywords in a Smart Manner
Like links, keywords play a significant role in search engine optimization. Also, like links, the improper use of keywords hurts an SEO campaign. Keyword stuffing doesn’t help things. Google’s web crawlers keep an eye out for websites stuffed with keywords. The sites no longer move up the ranking ladder. Instead, Google drops them down or, worse, may kick them out completely. So, resist the inclination to add keywords to every subpage in excess.
A wise first step with keywords commences with research. Choosing keywords at random rarely leads to positive results. Investing time with reliable keyword research tools could lead to amassing recommendations for keywords reflecting words and phrases people use in searches. Keywords do need to go into places that impact SEO. Keywords in a URL, for example, could prove beneficial. The same is true of keywords in page titles, taglines, and, of course, page content. Putting keywords into images’ file names can help as well.
Effectively using keywords works to your benefit. By making sure you know what keywords to use and how to use them, their value and impact could increase.
Streamline the Page Loading of the Website
Visitors don’t like it when a website loads too slow. Impatient visitors might not even wait for the website to finish loading. They might depart quickly. When visitors leave a webpage, Google notices. Page speed factors into website page ranking, which is not a new rule. Google instituted the rule nearly a decade ago.
Website publishers, however, might not be familiar with all the various rules Google has in place. Their focus remains on building up the “perfect” website. So, lots of videos, flash content, and more go into the design of the page. Everything looks great once the site fully loads. The load time, however, is working against the publisher and visitor. Don’t make avoidable mistakes like this one by not understanding SEO. Streamline the website, so it loads quickly and helps your ranking.
Keep Content from Going Stale
Revising your website’s content every week isn’t necessary, but you can’t let months go by without upgrading or changing things up. The search engines, especially Google, assume you abandoned the website when the content stays the same for too long. Adding or rewriting content might be enough to shake things up a bit. Retooling the site might be a good plan if the look is also outdated.
And is your content original? Duplicate content ranks poorly with the Google search engines. Rehashing material found elsewhere online isn’t a good idea, either. Always strive to present unique, original, and compelling content on a website. Both search engines and visitors might appreciate it.
Manually Submit the Site
Once you publish a website, it should show up in the search engines reasonably soon. Relying on anything that “should” happen may lead to disappointment. A better plan involves manually submitting the URL to Google and the other top search engines. Submitting to the site usually involves cutting and pasting the URL into a submission box. Do this with Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
What about all those minor search engines? Submit the URL to them as well. You might not see much traffic from them, but there’s no downside to receiving a few more visitors.
The search engines don’t try to penalize anyone, but they do have rules. Stay on top of them, so you don’t run into trouble with Google and its competitors. And optimize all the pages on your site to help maximize traffic in its direction.
