How to Get the Best SEO Ranking for Your Website in 5 Minutes
The common misconception about SEO is that it's time-consuming and difficult. As a website owner, you probably don't have much time to study the ins and outs of SEO optimization. What's more, you don't want to overspend to have a professional do it for you. Fortunately, there are SEO optimization techniques you can do yourself to put your page in a better position. Paired with the right and affordable SEO tools, you'll have little to no difficulty boosting your website standing! To do this, all you need is to perform these simple tasks daily and you should see a significant improvement in your website's traffic and sales figures. All you need to do is focus on a few simple tasks every day for about five to ten minutes. Here are some of them. Work on headings and titles In SEO marketing, Google is your best friend. Photo: Pixabay A well thought out title will help your customers find you and encourage them to click on your website. You definitely want your title to be search engine-friendly since it prioritizes the most relevant post for what online searchers are seeking. The best practices for page titles include keeping their length to less than 60 characters long and using your target keywords in them. Words such as why, how, where and what will be useful since they are the words most used for searching. Use meta descriptions to your advantage Meta descriptions are a few sentences that accompany search results. If you are using a content management system (CMS), you will find a place to write descriptions about your website within the application itself. Writing these descriptions in a way that raises interest can increase clicks on your website to a great extent. Search engines will take notice of the higher clicks and place your page on top of their list. Make the best use of SEO plugins Maximize your website's potential using these SEO techniques and tools. Photo: Pixabay This is true if you are using a WordPress site. WordPress allows you to make use of plugins to optimize websites for search engines. All in One WordPress SEO plugin by Semper is one of the most powerful and user-friendly SEO plugins for WordPress in the market. It has features that allow you to add meta title, description, keywords, and other necessary tags for quick on-page SEO optimization. The All in One WordPress SEO plugin should help you understand the art of SEO optimization better as well as your daily SEO strategies. Try it and see if it works for you. Use powerful descriptor words wherever possible Words such as Best, Ultimate, Now, Amazing or Review do a superb job in encouraging clicks. Pepper these words in your title and in the content, so that they will work as a call to action for your website. Buying is an emotional act and logic only comes later. These power words will hook readers to your website and make you stand out from the crowd. Keep your page simple and do not use duplicates Make sure your headlines are unique on every page to ensure your audience finds the right thing. Keep the tone of your post informal and simple so it will be more relatable. Plus, you give them the sense that you are on the same page. Focus on unique selling points Familiarize yourself with these SEO optimization tips. Photo: Pixabay Is your product the best in the market? What are its unique features? Every business has a unique selling point to talk about. Put that as the first thing on your page or blog, because that is what your customers will remember you for. A unique hook makes you stand out from your competitors and win you clicks. You can also promote special offers through this method. Make sure you add your hook and special offers in your meta descriptions. Look at your page and try to identify what your customer would need that would make them want to click. With on-page keyword SEO still being the key aspect for page ranking, it is in your best interest to create a text that is compelling and uses keywords. That will not only optimize your page but will reduce the time you spend worrying about whether you have done the right thing with your SEO.
Why site speed is critical for your SEO success and how to make it happen
30-second summary: The fact alone that the search engine giant has deemed site speed important should be enough for you to make it a priority. As your page load speed increases second-by-second, the bounce rate also increases a lot. It’s challenging enough to craft a call-to-action that convinces your site visitors to buy your product or services without adding any additional hurdles. Sprinkle in a bit of slow page load time, and you could be missing out on a ton of revenue. A walk through how to identify your site speed issues and fix them. Google has confirmed site speed as one of the 200+ factors that Google uses to determine your website’s position in search. The fact alone that the search engine giant has deemed site speed important should be enough for you to make it a priority. Beyond that, however, there are other reasons you should place a focus on the speed of your site. Let’s look at a couple of other critical reasons why you need to focus on your site’s speed for the success of your SEO efforts and the success of your business. Keep visitors on your site In a recent report, Google noted that 53% of mobile users will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. That’s where we’re at in this world in regard to our attention spans. Think about all the traffic you could lose if over half of the visitors to your site leave simply because they don’t have the patience to stick around longer than three seconds for your site to load. And with every second it takes for the pages on your site to load, the chances that your visitors will bounce increases. Take a look at this chart from the same study. It shows that, as your page load speed increases second-by-second, the bounce rate also increases, a lot. Source: Think with Google Reducing your site’s bounce rate is a focus for virtually every site owner or it should be anyway. So, make sure to pay attention to site speed to avoid issues in this area. Stop losing business It’s challenging enough to craft a call-to-action that convinces your site visitors to buy your product or services without adding any additional hurdles. Sprinkle in a bit of slow page load time, and you could be missing out on a ton of revenue. In fact, in 2012, Fast Company had conducted a study showing that even a one-second increase in page load time could cost Amazon $1.6 billion in lost revenue. Granted, your business likely doesn’t bring in the same revenue as Amazon, but you can still work the formula backward from Amazon’s actual revenue, determine what percentage that loss accounts for and then apply that to your revenue. Source: Fast Company Whatever that number is, I can guarantee you it’s not a number you want to lose when it comes to revenue. No business wants to lose revenue, no matter how large or small. What causes slow site speed and how do you fix the issues? You get the importance by now of making sure your site loads quickly. So, now let’s look at a few reasons why your site might be bogged down. 1. Large media files Videos, images, graphics, and other large media files can take up a lot of space. When a visitor hits your site, your site begins to serve up images, graphics, videos, and other media files that are supposed to exist on the page on which the visitor lands. If the files are super huge, this can slow down the speed of your site. The fix Host your video files elsewhere. Rather than hosting them on the site, host them in places like YouTube, Vimeo, and other such services. Then, embed the videos on your site. That way, visitors can still play the video right there on your page, but they won’t deal with any lag in load time. Regarding optimizing your images, try to use file types like JPEG, PNG, and GIF. These tend to load much more quickly than less optimized file types. 2. Avoid slow hosting services While you may be tempted to cut costs in an area like website hosting, I strongly advise against doing so. There are some affordable hosting options that do offer decent site speed, but often the cheap, cost-saving hosting services come with slow page load speeds. The fix First, look to avoid shared servers if you want your site to load fast. Shared servers are ok for smaller sites, but if you want to avoid the lag time, opt for another type of hosting. There are a variety of options here depending upon your site and your particular needs. So, do your research and figure out what the best option for hosting is for your site. 3. Not picking the right CMS There are tons of great CMS options for creating your website. Options such as Joomla, WordPress, Wix, and others are higher quality options and often help with your site’s load speed. There are less reliable CMS options, however, which can slow your site down. The fix WordPress is my personal preference for all the great plugins and other available tools at your disposal to help you boost your site’s performance. Avoid some of the lesser-known options, especially those with reputations for being highly unreliable. Focus instead on more proven options. If you’ve never heard of a particular CMS, do some digging, look at reviews, ask your peers, and make the best choice for your business. 4. Having too many redirects Redirects are an easy way to point site visitors away from content like a 404 page and toward relevant content that actually exists and might meet their needs. The problem is, if you have too many redirects on your site, you can start to aggravate your site visitors. Think about the extra second or two a redirected link causes as it finds the new content. Those seconds could lose a visitor’s attention. The fix I’m not saying don’t use redirects. They are a highly useful tool. That said, try to use them sparingly. Also, try to limit multiple levels of redirects which can add even more seconds on to the page load time. 5. Too much code Too much code can bog down your site. Javascript, CSS, and HTML can all include unnecessary code that can lead to your site slowing down. The fix Cut down on any unnecessary characters like commas and spaces. This alone can help speed up your site. Also, get a skilled developer to look at your code. There are potentially a lot of lines of code on your site that are unnecessary. One example of how this can happen is when someone copies and pastes something from a Word Document right into your site. This can add lots of lines of unnecessary code. In this instance, it’s best to instead copy and paste the text into a text editor, then bring the copy into your site. These are just a handful of the many things that can slow down your site. Start here, as each of the above can have a significant impact. Then take it a step further and bring in an expert to dig through your site and analyze any other issues that might be impacting your site’s load time. Wrapping things up You’ve seen the evidence. Now I highly recommend digging around and checking out the page speed on your own website. Fortunately, that task is simple. Here are a few great tools to easily check the load speed of your website. Google’s Pagespeed insights YSlow Pingdom Uptrends Dotcom-Monitor I can’t stress enough how important it is to focus on the speed of your website. Why put your site at risk of turning visitors away and missing out on revenue critical to the growth of your business. Even if you run a blog and don’t sell services or products directly on your site, your revenue likely comes through Google AdSense clicks or affiliate marketing, thus you still need to rely on high traffic levels and people sticking around your site. So, no matter what niche you are in, get focused on site speed now, and address the issue before it becomes a major problem. Anthony is the Founder of AnthonyGaenzle.com a marketing and business blog. He also serves as the Head of Marketing and Business Development at Granite Creative Group, a full-service marketing firm. He is a storyteller, strategist, and eternal student of marketing and business strategy.
8 Silly But Harmful SEO Mistakes Even Professionals Make
Kicking yourself because of a recent SEO oversight? You’re not alone. SEO has become a complex field that simply getting down the basics can be a behemoth task. And the average SEO strategy covers a lot! There are keywords, meta tags, and off-page optimizations to take care of, aside from more advanced tips, tools, and tricks to learn and use to get the job done well. It can be overwhelming. Also, because of the metrics, we can’t hide from any mistakes or oversights because the numbers will show it. You can be the most detail-oriented, diligent professional out there but the fact is: there’s plenty of room for things to go wrong, or for you to slip up even when you’re at the top of your field. My hat’s off to you if you’ve never messed up at least one little thing! Here are eight silly mistakes that even the SEO professionals sometimes make. Advertisement Continue Reading Below 1. Leaving a Noindex / Nofollow Command on the Site Upon Launching You can prevent a page on a website (or an entire website) from appearing in Google by using a noindex meta tag in your site’s header code. When Googlebot sees that tag, it’ll immediately drop the page from the search results. That’s useful if you’re still developing your site, or you don’t have root access to a server and want more control over access to specific pages or the whole site for any reason. But if you forget to take it out before your big site launch? Oops. Another mistake can be putting a noindex meta tag into the site’s header code and then blocking the command with a robots.txt. Remember: you need to do one or the other. Not both. 2. Not Using Google Analytics and/or Google Search Console Ideally, you should be using both. Google Analytics gives you all the data you need to understand the performance of your website. It tells you about things like traffic, demographics, and how long your readers hang around before they bounce. Advertisement Continue Reading Below Google Search Console gives you everything you need to improve your site. It’ll tell you about who’s linking to you, whether technical errors exist, and more. You’re missing out if you aren’t using them. Yet, some professionals forego them altogether. Why? That’s simple: There are a lot of tools out there. Many of them are proprietary and few of them are cheap. Plus, once we find a tool we like, we tend to keep on using it. While other tools may offer similar capabilities to Google Analytics or Search Console, at the end of the day, however, they may not give the best results. Another common mistake that some professionals make is not spending enough time on Google itself. A good SEO can get everything he or she needs directly from the search engine. The only thing fancy SEO tools do is make that information easier to read, more accessible, and available to you more quickly. 3. Optimizing for the Wrong Keywords Did you know that SEO professionals have a blind spot when it comes to keywords? It might sound surprising because we do so much keyword research. But doing that can lead to being too set in doing things a certain way, even when there could be some better way to do it. Specifically, we can develop bad habits and end up optimizing for the wrong keywords. Sometimes we end up optimizing from the business perspective, when we should be doing it from the perspective of our clients’ customers. Let me give you an example. Company A sells shoes specifically for people with hallux valgus, better known as bunions. The content of the site reflects the show design, which is evidence-based and rooted in the science of it. The keywords chosen were “hallux valgus shoe” and “evidence-based shoes to treat bunions.” Nice, specific, low competition long-tail keywords. Seemed perfect, yes? Not quite. A few weeks later, we started getting emails and phone calls from doctors asking about prescription requirements or how to acquire them for their patients. Advertisement Continue Reading Below But we were trying to sell to the general public. To break this habit, it’s a good idea to spend some time researching what people will search for when they’re looking for answers to their problems. Try to find out what language they use. It won’t always be the official terminology, so it matters what language you speak to land in front of your target audience. 4. Not Using Internal Links Citing your sources with lots of super high-quality, authoritative links is a really good idea. It helps your readers take you seriously and it signals to Google that you can be trusted to provide good information. (It’s even one of the things they specify in their search quality evaluator guidelines.) However, sometimes we get really excited about external links and neglect the internal ones. Remember that they’re also important. Internal links are a great way to boost your position in the SERPs because they: Make it easier for Googlebot to crawl your site. Help signal topic clusters and important pages. Drive traffic to other parts of your site. Advertisement Continue Reading Below 5. Not Improving Content Did you know that Google has a freshness algorithm? It does. If you’re serving up stale content, you might notice your page rankings – and traffic – start to drop. Stale content is content that has become: Outdated due to new statistics or market changes. Incorrect due to the emergence of new information. Irrelevant due to changes in how Google understands a keyword. Devalued due to algorithm updates. Content isn’t a “set it and forget it” thing. Plus, links break, files go missing, and keywords fall out of usage. Therefore, you should make sure you’re keeping an eye on your pages. Remove old content and adjust anything that looks like it’s sliding. Google will appreciate it, and reward you with a better position in the SERPs. 6. Not Optimizing for Search Intent Similar to using the wrong keywords, failing to optimize for user search intent can prove just as devastating to your SEO strategy. Fortunately, optimizing for search intent has gotten a whole lot easier as Google fine tunes its ability to deliver exactly what people are looking for. Advertisement Continue Reading Below Generally, Google splits searches into three main categories: “Do” searches. These are transactional in nature, such as “buy laptop online.” “Know” and “know simple” searches. These are informative in nature, such as “best laptops 2020.” “Go” searches. These are navigational in nature, such as “laptop seller near me” or “laptop return policy site:example.com.” You want to optimize for each of these searches because they also correspond to steps in the customer’s journey. That maximizes the chances of you getting the right content in front of the right customers at just the right point, when they need it. 7. Thinking SEO Is Only Concerned with Traffic Pop into any SEO message board or subreddit and you’ll see post after post that looks like this: Advertisement Continue Reading Below “Why am I not getting more traffic?” “How do I drive traffic to my new site?” “Best SEO strategies to boost site traffic quickly?” Traffic, traffic, traffic. Sure, as SEO partners, it’s our job to drive traffic to sites. A good SEO strategy will accomplish exactly this. But what’s equally as important as traffic? Conversions. You can have all the traffic you want, but it won’t mean anything at the end of the day if your readers aren’t following through and hitting purchase or subscribe. Remember, like with all things you should value quality over quantity. Lots of site traffic but low conversions mean that you’re attracting a lot of irrelevant visitors. A small number of highly-targeted customers is better than tons of lookie-loos. 8. Putting SEO ‘on Pause’ So, you’ve built your site. You’ve loaded it chock-full of super helpful information. You’ve crafted an SEO strategy and let it loose in the search engine. Advertisement Continue Reading Below You’re rising in the SERPs. People are filtering into your site… And then you let it all slide. What the heck happened? You were doing well, that’s what happened. You discovered that your SEO engine was working, and you got complacent. Maybe you put your focus on other things like improving your product line, thinking that your SEO would be good for a while. SEO is not a light switch. It’s not a machine that will just keep chugging away, delivering results. It’s more like a windup toy – if you don’t maintain it and constantly improve, it’ll run out of steam. Your ranks will degrade. You’ll fade again into the obscurity that is Page 2 (or beyond) of Google. Here’s the Takeaway: Even When You Know What You’re Doing, Plenty Can Go Wrong Planning, implementing, and maintaining a viable SEO strategy involves a lot of moving pieces. It’s enough to drive anyone crazy. Advertisement Continue Reading Below It also means there are plenty of opportunities to make little oversights and mistakes that can devastate your position in the SERPs. There. I’ve just covered eight things that are super simple (even silly) in hindsight, but that professionals do by accident every single day. Happy ranking. More Resources: Image Credits All screenshots taken by author
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