What Your Website Needs to Be Optimized Fully

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February 4, 2021 Marketing

Have you been struggling to find a way to increase the traffic to your website? That could be because you haven’t optimized your webpage to its full capacity.

While we might feel like everything on the internet is a search and a click away – behind the scenes, there are many factors that come into play when you get results from a search engine.

Whether you plan on hiring a professional to manage your website or are learning to optimize yourself, there are plenty of methods to get your website at the top of Google’s results page by using SEO – also known as Search Engine Optimization.

What Is SEO?

So what exactly is Search Engine Optimization? For starters, its levels basically dictate the amount of organic traffic your website accumulates. Your SEO ‘score’ can be manipulated by using good optimization techniques.

These techniques range from technical implementations that exist in the inner workings of your websites all the way to the ‘outer’ practices that are visible to your audience.

Overall these techniques we’ll be talking about make your webpage more visible – meaning your web page will appear higher up on the results page and therefore garner more clicks.

If you plan on optimizing your website like this, it’s important to do your research. One misstep in these techniques and you might find your website heading in the opposite direction.

Technical SEO

Like we mentioned before, there are important SEO tactics that work behind the scenes. This is where most website owners seek professional help to aid them in getting these up and running.

Technical SEO includes:

Maintaining and fixing code errors in the makeup of your website
Use Google Search Console to make sure your keywords are functioning on your webpage as they should.
Use Google Analytics to track down content that isn’t performing well. You can either optimize this content or remove it completely.
Update your website/companies location settings and submit them to Google Maps. Google tends to favor showing user results that are in their vicinity making it more likely that they’ll not only visit your website but potentially your in-person business.
Register with Google My Business to provide customers with your updated and correct information.

Domain Name

Believe it or not, your website domain name plays a great role in the success rate of your web traffic. Keeping your domain name as close as possible to your niche and consistent keywords will benefit you greatly.

However, make sure not to get caught up in the keywords. Overuse of them can lead to Google sending your webpage way down the results page.

Try to keep your domain names simple. That means no hyphens, misspelled or complicated words, or domains that end in anything other than .com. Otherwise, these websites will often get blacklisted as spam.

The most important thing to make sure operates correctly is your domain prefix. Make sure that your website will still load even if a user withholds the classic www. You don’t want Google to tag your domain as two different websites.

Quality Content

You may not think that the quality of your content has a huge impact on your website’s ‘health’ but making sure the content you post is relevant goes a long way.

Whether you’re posting blogs and articles – or even images and videos – there are ways to make sure the information your providing is always relevant.

It may be easy to slip into the mindset that your content needs to be aimed at writing for SEO, but Google has gone beyond that. The search engine promotes content that is written for the benefit of its users.

Google favors content that has a higher word count rather than the number of times you include a keyword.

It’s also important to think about the amount of time your content will stay relevant. Are you writing a blog or article on a topic that people will stop searching about in a week? Or are you providing Google with content that will be useful long-term?

Publishing what we call evergreen content – content that is always relevant – will help keep your website as a whole at the top pages of Google’s results page.

This type of content ensures a steady flow of traffic and will draw attention and clicks to your content that isn’t evergreen as well.

User-Friendly Web Pages

It’s great that you’re making your website readable to Google, but are you creating a user experience that’s efficient for everyone?

Like we mentioned earlier, keeping a simple domain name is good for SEO but it also makes it easier for a user to remember and is more welcoming than a potentially more complicated domain.

We’re not always browsing the internet on our computer anymore. We have phones, tablets, and even watches that are connected to the internet in the 21st century. That means it’s important to make sure your webpage is fully functional on all of these platforms. This is also something Googe takes into consideration.

Image Tagging

Image uploading is something we’ve all become experts at, however, when you’re trying to optimize a web page there are a few extra steps that are needed to upload those images correctly.

Adding not only a caption but alt text to your image that reads as a small description of the image, allows Google to pick up on these images. Adding words that are relevant to your topic is of course always favored – you still want that image to pop up with the proper search.

Social Media

Finally, you want to make sure that your webpage has corresponding social pages. Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook should all have similar handles to your domain name. It’s also important to link to these social pages on your webpage and vice versa.

Social Media also works as the relatively free advertisement so that doesn’t hurt either.

Time To Optimize

Now that you know the basic and most relevant techniques to SEO and overall optimization, it’s time to decide whether you want to take on this venture yourself or hire a professional.

Whichever path you take, remember to do your research. Make sure not to get caught up in appealing to Google, think about what your audience’s needs are, and cater to that.