SEO is one of the most important elements of running a site. If your site is invisible to Google, then unfortunately, you might as well not exist; customers will find it difficult to find your site and enjoy what you’re doing, whether that be ecommerce, blogging, or anything else. That’s why it’s important to supercharge your site for SEO so that Google knows exactly how to find you and index you. With that in mind, there are lots of little SEO tips and tricks out there that could give you the edge over your competition. Here are 10 SEO tips to supercharge your site.
1. Hit up the professionals
Pros always know what they’re doing better than anybody else does, so if you’re struggling to optimise your site for SEO, then why not seek the services of a professional? Blogging outreach services like inetventures.com are perfect for these purposes; they’ll help you get organic, natural backlinks, which in turn will boost your chances of being seen and ranked highly by Google. Don’t be afraid to talk to professionals if you’re not sure about doing things yourself!
2. Fix dead links
If there are any dead links on your site, that’s a huge SEO red flag; it could mean that Google will have trouble knowing what to do with your site, because internal links are a huge way that Google crawls sites to index them. That’s why you need to make sure you’re going through your site and fixing dead links wherever you find them. Online tools are available to help you do this if your site is getting too unwieldy to manually search for dead links, so don’t worry.
3. Don’t write for SEO
It might sound counterintuitive to tell you not to write for SEO as part of a list about best SEO practices, but the fact is that writing for real human beings is actually one of the best ways you can optimise the SEO on your site. If you write for search engines, your content will come across as mechanical and impersonal, and ironically, that will actually cause your ranking to drop on Google. Make sure that your content is written as though people will actually read it!
4. Don’t keyword-stuff
Keyword-stuffing is a real problem in the world of SEO. It refers to when you’re simply putting all the keywords you can think of in your article without regard to whether or not they work or feel natural. Google looks down on this practice and will punish your site harshly for doing it; keyword-stuffing is part of what’s known as “black hat SEO”, whereby writers will try to manipulate search engines instead of just building great sites with good content.
5. Work on your titles and descriptions
When Google displays search results, it shows not only the page title, but also a small description of the content you’ll find within. Optimising both of these elements of the page for SEO is critical, because they’re both very important to the way Google indexes pages. Your meta description should have your targeted SEO keyword in it, as should your title, and your page title should be short enough to fit onto Google without cutting off. You can use free tools like this one to help you.
6. Write some guest posts
If you’re a blogger, then offering to write guest posts for other sites is a great way to generate backlinks, which in turn will tell Google that you’re an authority in your field to be trusted. Guest posts will put your name out there as a content creator worthy of note, too, which could stand you in good stead for getting future work. There are other ways to obtain backlinks, like being added to human-edited directories or talking directly to publishers, but guest posts are the main way many bloggers generate them.
7. Page load is king
Your page load speed should ideally be somewhere between one and five seconds. If it’s any more than that, visitors to your site will lose interest and begin to look elsewhere. Less than a second would be incredible, but it’s not really possible for most sites to achieve this given that they have to contain some content as well! Aim for between a second and five seconds (four if possible) and you should be fine when it comes to page load speed.
8. Optimise for responsive design
Mobile and tablet devices are just as important as desktop devices when it comes to web traffic. A large percentage of your customer base will access your site from alternative devices, so make sure that you’ve optimised for those devices. If they don’t like the look of your site, or if it doesn’t load properly on their phone or tablet, then you can bet they’ll just look elsewhere, so it’s important to grab them as soon as you can with a great-looking site design.
9. Make sure your images are optimised
If your images aren’t good, then you’re hamstringing yourself for SEO. Optimising your images is a great way to boost your Google ranking, and it’ll make your content look much better as well. First, you need to make sure that the resolution is around 1920×1080. Any more than that and pages will struggle to load for many users. You also need to edit metadata and alt attributes (text and titles) to ensure that they’re optimised for accessibility.
10. Use internal links…sparingly
You’ve probably heard that internal links are the Holy Grail when it comes to SEO, and that’s true to a certain extent. Internally linking to other pages on your site gives Google a faster way to crawl your pages, but that doesn’t mean you should go crazy with the internal links. Keep them to a classy minimum; link content that’s relevant to the page, but don’t just add as many links as you can, as this might actually harm your SEO in the long term.
