A common mistake that many website owners make is thinking that improving their SEO ranking is something which can only take place away from their website. They clamour for backlinks and will make plans for a social media onslaught, and while these can help, a more sensible strategy would be to look at ways of improving the SEO on their own doorstep; in other words, their website.
One of the biggest benefits of working on your website to improve its SEO, is you are in full control of what you do. You can select which aspects of your website you want to work on, and in which order you do them.
You can choose the number of resources you want to employ in terms of time, effort, and possibly even funds, should you decide to outsource any of the work.
Here are 3 important changes you can make to your website, which can improve your search engine rankings.
#1 Content: Most webmasters and website owners should already know that content is important, not only for ranking their website but for the benefit of visitors to the site.
You need to assess whether the content on your site has the appropriate keywords, if it is engaging enough to make visitors to your website want to stay and ask yourself if it is the correct type of content for your market.
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘No’, then you need to correct your existing content, and make sure that any new content which you add, helps your website, rather than hinders it.
In this multimedia age, the days of just using written content are long gone although it is no less important. However, you need to think about other content such as audio, images, video, and where possible make it as interactive as possible.
Content which engages your visitors, not only helps you to build a loyal following, it also makes your website worthier of a higher ranking in the eyes of Google, because of the time that people spend there.
#2 Responsive Design: Are you reading this article from a mobile device or from a PC? If we were to ask Google, they would tell us that around 60% of our website visitors reading this will be on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. This means that 6 out of every 10 people who visit your website will also be on a mobile device, and if the design of your website isn’t responsive to that, you are losing out.
Not only will you quickly lose those potential customers, the fact that they’ll click away almost immediately will not go unnoticed by our friends at Google. Google has stated that having a web design that is mobile friendly is a significant element in their ranking algorithm. If it isn’t already, your website needs to be made mobile responsive and make sure any new pages, content, multi-media or graphics you add are too.
#3: Internal Link Structuring: This is one part of website SEO that most owners either get wrong or worse, they do not even know it exists. This is unfortunate, as it is relatively simple to get right. The reason it impacts on your rankings is that each link from one page tells Google both the relevance and importance of the page it is linking to.
Some basic principles include, not linking too many times to your homepage, and instead link to pages deeper into your website. You should also avoid linking to pages that don’t really have content such as you ‘contact us’ page. In terms of the number of links, there are no hard and fast rules but using 1 link per 150 words of content is a good rule of thumb.
