Top 5 SEO Tips:
The world of the internet is always changing and so are the procedures that we need to follow to stay relevant on the world wide web. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website or content appear on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) when someone searches for the keywords that you want to show up for. Now there isn’t just one way to make your website appear on Google. The reason being that Google cares more about delivering relevant information to the user than showing your website. So, to make Google see that your website has the content that the user is looking for, here are a few things you can do to improve your website’s SEO.
1. Keep Your Website Light and Fast:
There’s a reason people say “less is more”. Because it is true. Something that’s simple and fast is much more useful than something that’s complex and sluggish. Google recognizes and considers website speed a critical aspect when deciding which websites to show on the results. An example of a slow and sluggish website would be a website with a lot of fancy animations and heavy graphics that take time to get fully loaded.
Think of it this way, the user probably typed a query on google and your website is listed in the results. Great! Now the user is very impatient to get the answer they’re looking for, so if your website is going to take several seconds to load the user is most likely going to bounce off the website and try to find the answer on a different website. The user wants the information quickly and couldn’t care less if you have the fanciest animations on your website. So, always try to keep your website as light and simple as possible with minimal to no animations, the least amount of plugins, compressed images and an elegant layout.
2. Give Credit Where It’s Due (External Linking & Backlinks):
Some people hesitate to include external links because they believe these links take users off your page and onto some other websites. Link building plays an important role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Linking out to other sources helps you in the following ways:
- As said by the founder of Moz, Rand Fishkin, “Linking out sends trackable traffic, it makes your site a more valuable and scalable resource”.
- It shows your audience that you’ve done your research and you have resources to back it up.
- It helps your users get more information if they wish to read more about something. Thus improving the quality of the information provided by you.
One of the things you can do is inform the influencer or company that you’ve linked to them. If your blog is valuable then they might link back to you. A word of advice, focus more on quality links rather than quantity. A single high-quality external link beats a hundred poor quality links when it comes to SEO.
3. Write content for humans, not Search Engines:
Gone are the days when developers could fool the Google algorithm by stuffing a bunch of keywords in their content for the sake of SEO. Today, the search engine crawlers are smart enough to detect such tricks and doing so actually does more harm than good. Google is looking to give the user exactly what they asked, therefore, it will check whether the content on your website makes sense. So, forget about the search engines. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. What would they want to read about and how you can provide the answers they’re looking for in the best possible way.
A page that gives a user actual information would do much better than a page that has keywords stuffed in it for the sake of showing up in google results. While writing content for your website, always think about what the user will get out of this and how you can provide the information in the most effective way.
4. Keep Your URLs Readable:
Most people can tell what the webpage is about simply by looking at its URL slug. Take the following example:
https://workweartoronto.com/best-christmas-gift-ideas-for-him-2020/
The URL leaves nothing to the mystery. It tells you right there what the article is about. Thus saving you time if it isn’t something you’re looking for. Not only does it help users, using friendly and easy to read URLs helps the search engines to determine what you’re article is about and that’s our ultimate goal.
An example of a bad URL structure would be:
https://workweartoronto.com/article/086653745
It doesn’t make anything clear and you’re going to have to click on it to see what the article is about. So, always use URLs that can be read by people, giving them a brief idea of what the content is about.
5. Never forget to write relevant and unique meta descriptions for each page:
This one has been around since Search Engine Optimization (SEO) came into the picture and it is still one of the most important things to do if you want your page ranked on SERPs. Meta tags and descriptions are the first things that a search engine crawler checks for to determine what your page is about. Always use unique and relevant descriptions. Using duplicate meta descriptions for multiple pages could get you penalized and will definitely not provide a great user experience.
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