Search engine optimization is one of the most popular trends in today’s digital world. It is something that every online business and brand should focus on. As per the research done by Search Engine People, it has been found that the top results on the SERP page have a 33% chance of being clicked. This means that the lower a website ranks, the lesser would be the amount of traffic that you can attract.
The main reason why there might be websites that are ranking higher than you is that they are making a continuous effort to enhance their SEO. You might spend a lot of time on your website’s SEO. However, it is always better to learn some techniques and tricks that can help your website ranking higher on the SERP. In this article, we would be discussing some of the effective tips to improve your website’s SEO in an hour. Keep on reading to learn more!
Tips to Improve the SEO of a Website
There are several tricks and techniques that you can apply to boost SEO and improve traffic on your website. Below we have listed down the top 5 tips to improve your website’s SEO in an hour.
Tip 1: Select the Correct URL and Have a Separate Title for Each Page
You need to give a name to your website before it can go live. The URL of a website is also referred to as the domain name of the website. This is the address typed by the visitors while looking for your website. This is one of the first things that a visitor looks at and also one of the things that search engines look at to know what your website is all about and how to rank it in SERP.
It is thus important to ensure that the URLs of all your web pages are beautiful and clean. It should not contain any hashtags, special characters or any page ID. A good domain name consists of the name of your business and any keyword relevant to the business. The additional keyword can also denote the industry in which your business is based.
Additionally, while domain name plays a huge role in SEO, it is also a good idea to have separate titles as well as descriptions for every webpage. Titles and descriptions are generally brief texts that can clearly and accurately describe the nature of your business. To understand a title better, just hover over the tab on the browser. You would see that a short phrase will pop up under the mouse. This is the title of the page. These texts can also include some phrases or keywords mixed in it.
The description of each web page, although not visible, is quite important for a search engine. Title and description are some of the most crucial elements that are tracked by search engines for determining the ranking of your website. Web surfers and visitors also tend to check the title and description of a website on the search results page before checking it out. Many might decide to check information about your website based on this information.
Tip 2: Use a Text Hierarchy and include Alt Text to the Images
Ensure that all the web pages of your website have a title, subtitle, etc. The search engines would be able to understand the content of your website better if you have the right text hierarchy in your website. The title of the web page is the most important component and it should be defined as H1 in the editor.
The H1 needs to describe the content of the web page properly and one should have only one H1 on every web page. The title should be chosen carefully while including any main target keywords. In the content hierarchy, H1 is followed by H2, H3 and so on. The H1 corresponds to the title of the web page whereas the H2 and H3 correspond to the headings and subheadings respectively. Make the structure of the text clear so that the search engines can easily digest the content of your website.
While search engines can read the website content easily, they might find it hard to understand the images on a web page. To ensure that they understand the images too, it is a good idea to include ‘alt text’ in the images so that the search engines understand what is being displayed in the graphic or the image. The ‘alt text’ is a small written description of an image on the web page. It should concisely and accurately describe the purpose of the image. You can include the business name or some related keywords to your business.
You can skip the ’alt text’ for an image if it is a background image. It should be included only for those images that are related to the topic of the website.
Tip 3: Include the Target Keywords of the Competitors
Google had lifted the ban on bidding on the branded keywords of the competitors in the year 2008. This allows the website owners to bid for the competitor’s brand keywords as well, as long as you do not include their trademark name in your ads.
If you bid on the competitor’s keywords, chances are that your brand traffic would increase, especially with the customers and visitors who are looking for a specific product or service that you and your competitors offer. According to a study, the branded keywords phrases are more likely to convert their visitors to successful leads. Thus, the chances of conversion and retention become very high.
By using the weakness of your competitors to your advantage, you can ensure success for your brand. Including an eye-catchy ad copy and target, keywords would help you in ensuring that there is higher traffic on your website. This way, you can attract potential customers to your brand even when they are searching for your competitor.
Tip 4: Optimize the Page Load Speed for Mobile Site
With the introduction of Google’s mobile-first index, the digital world has started moving to smartphones and tablets. High-speed internet, as well as the introduction of 5G, has also contributed to the mobile-first approach. This time is now the best for a growing mobile audience for your website. It is also a great way to move ahead of your competitors who are not applying a mobile-first approach.
A mobile website which has a low page load speed would not have a good user experience. It can also hurt the search engine ranking of a website. Since about 50% of Google searches are done on mobile, the page load time on mobiles has gained paramount importance. Work on it to ensure that a user can search for the required information on your website easily and quickly.
One of the main reasons for the low page load speed of a website can be the inclusion of large images on the web pages. One of the web design platforms, Duda is a mobile-friendly platform for agencies for launching mobile-optimized sites within a matter of minutes. The images are automatically compressed and resized, which allows the web pages to render in a small amount of time. This way, you also wouldn’t have to worry about how the images are being served to various devices.
Tip 5: Check the Website for Broken Links and Duplicate Tags
In case your website has duplicate content, chances are the ranking of your website would drop significantly the SERP. Thus, a business needs to focus on content marketing for attracting more customers to the website. There might arise some content duplication issues while creating content for the website. This is more likely if you have a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, where creating duplicate pages is more common. It also affects the SEO of the website.
You should also check for any broken links on your website. These links can be internal or external to the website. Several tools can help you in assessing issues related to duplicate content. One of the tools that can help you is Siteliner which can easily discover duplicate content as well as broken links on your website. It also provides a free content analysis report for your reference. It is easy to fix the issues once you have found them.
Conclusion
Having a good SEO practice makes all the difference in deciding whether your website ranks higher in the search engine results or not. Not having the same can result in a lower click-through rate and can affect the conversions. To ensure that the SEO of your website gets improved over time, just follow the above tips and you would be done within an hour. These tips are sure to give the necessary boost to your website’s ranking. Make sure that you force the search engines to recrawl your site once all the changes are implemented.
