When creating your own website, many website owners often expect and brace themselves for an instant flurry of business. It would be extremely satisfying if that were the case. Then, after the completion of a shiny new website, traffic and revenue were to increase rapidly. From traffic to conversions and productivity, it would be great if this happened on their own, however, a number of businesses often forget the importance of SEO.
Not just vital for newly built websites, but older, more established brands, SEO, and website optimization should not be overlooked.
We will discuss why website optimization is so important and the many quick wins that you can take to optimize your website for the benefits that you seek.
What Is Website Optimization And Why Is It Important?
Website optimization is the process of improving certain parts of a site, in order for it to be seen by search engines. In doing this, the optimized features will help contribute to how much traffic is witnessed by your website, while improving conversion rates.
By using the tools within SEO and marketing, a difference in performance can quickly be seen. Benefiting not just the conversion of the site, but the appearance and the page speed, website optimization can work to the benefit of your business.
When optimizing the site, there are a few aspects that need to be included, helping you to become visible as high up as possible within search engines, to produce the most traffic towards your site. To aid you in this, I will be talking through everything you need to know about optimization and the many quick wins that you can follow to make sure that your website is fully optimized.
The URL
Many website owners do not realize that the URL of not just their site, but of each individual page is an important and vital aspect. Used for advertising within a google search, it should be highlighted that Google shortens the URL, helping to neatly display the address within the search results.
With this key fact in mind ensure that the URL is readable, even when cutting down. This way, the consumer will be able to understand exactly what is on a page while helping it to correlate with the advertised content. Another top tip to fully optimize your URL would be to make it memorable and snappy, the longer the URL, the less likely that customers will be able to remember the address, reducing the amount of direct traffic that you experience to your priority pages.
Page Titles
One step down from the URL is the page titles. A key factor as to whether your page will be seen or not, and to determine just how high it can rank in the search engine is the page titles. The page title is key to keeping a well-thought balance between SEO, and on-page readability.
It would be suggested to ensure that all titles are written with the minimum amount of characters to ensure none is cut away within the search results, before adding the keywords to the content on the page. Likewise, with the URL, the page titles form somewhat of an advert, so ensuring it is optimized correctly while inspiring potential readers to click, will surely improve the click-through rate.
Images
An aspect of your page that often gets overlooked and rushed is the addition of images.
When it comes to optimizing images, the process is more than simply adding a photo to a page for interest purposes. In fact, if not optimized properly, the page may never be seen.
When it comes to optimizing images, the feature of ‘ALT Tags’ or ‘alt attributes’ should be included. This ALT Tag is applied to an image to provide it with a text alternative that the search engines will be able to read. This needs to be done as engines cannot see images, but they can read. Providing a description of the image will allow them to know they are on the page and are relevant to the search query, therefore positively impacting the website’s rankings.
Adding Links
It is important for a site to have a reputable amount of links both internal and external, not only to produce partnerships, relevance, and trust but also to improve SEO. Providing your audience with links to other sites that are on-topic or addressing the same topic as yourself with matching facts, shows that you are showing trust in the content while helping to create a knowledgeable, experienced presence on the internet.
However, it is important to only link to those who have a quality DA ranking, as low-quality sites could create a negative effect. Too many low DA sites from spammy web pages will have a negative effect, with a risk of lowering your Domain Authority.
Page Speed
It has been hinted by Google that page speed now contributes as an indicator, deciding how your site should be ranked and its position within a search engine. By ensuring that each page on the website is not loaded with excessive Plug-Ins, and add-ons, you can ensure that the page loading speed sticks to the recommended 2 seconds or less.
Similarly, this can be improved by ensuring that the site is placed on a reliable hosting platform. There are two options of hosting available, these are internal and external.
Internal hosting is done by the company themselves, in order to have full access and control of the entire site at any time. Large businesses such as Google will take on this job, as they have the resources to be able to comply with the demand of hosting their own site. One main resource that would be recommended however to those who wish to host their own site, is to purchase a reliable server, that is compatible with the workload at hand. That of a rackmount server would be most beneficial and is highly recommended by many, to keep that page speed as low as possible.
Next, there is external hosting. Unlike internal, this is done by an outside source. A company that provides the service of running and hosting the website for you. This takes away a huge workload from the company and allows their time to be dedicated elsewhere while ensuring their site is in safe hands, yet can still be accessed at any time.
Keywords
It is very important to compile a set of keywords that can be implemented into each web page when optimizing your website for SEO. In doing this, it makes it possible for the site to be found through search engines such as Google when the search includes such keywords that you have mentioned and have optimized your web page for.
If you want to stay completely anonymous when doing keyword research, you can utilize free proxies as they will hide your IP address from any website you’re accessing.
It would be very beneficial to know what kind of language people would use that would spark your site appearing in the search engine. From here, devising a keyword strategy will allow every piece of content to be keyword rich, therefore making your site become a great offering to anyone who performs a search query, and becomes compatible with a range of questions asked by Google.
Summary
There are many aspects of a site that need to be taken into consideration in order for it to be optimized for search engine rankings. With the most important ones addressed above, this is the best place to start your site’s optimization journey, in creating a site that is high-ranking, trustworthy, and receives a high volume of converting traffic.
From the page URL, page titles and links to the keywords implemented into the content, these seemingly small aspects can create a huge difference to whether your site is seen or not. Therefore, it just goes to show how important they are, despite coming across as rather meaningless tasks.
By ensuring each of these, and more, are all completed when building and adding content to your site, then there is no reason why your site should not have a respectful ranking within the search results. Helping to quickly produce traffic and conversion rates, while increasing productivity and service.
Sydney Tierney; who just recently finished her studies; is working her way into the world of content writing as a digital marketing assistant. She writes for clients that specialize in workstations, energy procurement, and SEO specialists.
