Semalt And Only Semalt If You Need To Improve Your Website SEO!
Search engine optimization is not just about keywords. It affects different areas of expertise and often requires a number of SEO experts on your team.
But often, you are the only person dealing with all SEO issues for a website. Whatever your initial situation, we've briefly explained SEO here in four important points you need to improve your SEO ranking.
1. The content of your articles remains the top priority for website SEO
It is obvious that content is one of the most important SEO factors. Search engines and your visitors may be interested in your content. But, let's look at what Google and other search engines are really interested in:
Meta title and Meta description
Every time you create new content, you should have a meta title and a meta description on your to-do list.
This is because the meta description gives your visitors a condensed overview of your website. It is important to mention that Google recently changed the algorithm and thus gave you more space for meta descriptions. Instead of 165 characters, you can now use up to 320 characters without risking being cut off in the search results.
Content quality
High-quality and engaging content is not only important for your visitors, but also for Google. The days when Google only counted keywords are long gone. So, up-to-date, concise and easily understandable content is an important ingredient for the good SEO of a website. This, of course, also applies to a website without broken links.
Readability
Readability is about your content being clear and easy to understand. This is an often-overlooked centerpiece of a successful SEO strategy. But, it makes your website content accessible to all visitors. If the sentences are too long or the words too complicated for your target audience, not only are you losing your readers, but Google is also paying attention.
Updating content
To stay relevant in the SEO jungle, it's important to update your content regularly. Have a content inventory and schedule regular updates to page content. However, multimedia files will not only make all the difference in your website's ranking, but will also increase the number of visitors to your site.
Keywords
Of course, if you want to position yourself with certain keywords, they must be in many parts of your website or blog. Where? Above all, in titles and subtitles, in the first 200 words of the text, throughout the entire text in bold or italics, in the meta-description, in the title and alternative text of the images, and of course in the URLs (They should be short and friendly).
In addition to being in many parts, you must analyze how much you are going to repeat them. Ideally, these keywords should be repeated 0.5% throughout the entire text. There are numerous tools that calculate your keyword percentage for you.
But what words do we choose? Of course, closely related to your topic, but we must carry out a keyword study to analyze which words have a higher search volume since those will be the ones we use to position ourselves. One tool that you can use to analyze keywords is Semalt's Dedicated SEO Dashboard.
Links with anchor texts
What are anchor texts? When we link content, we can simply put the URL or a word in which, if you click, it directs you to the linked web page. This word or set of words is the anchor text.
To improve SEO positioning, it is more convenient to make links with these anchor texts and of course, that these texts are keywords of the web page to which we are linking. It is not the same to link saying "this page" as to link saying "this SEO guide", since you are giving valuable information regarding the web page you want to take the user to.
Likewise, it is convenient to vary the anchor texts, not always use them. Since Google could penalize these links.
2. Don't neglect the details of technical SEO
Without a solid technical foundation on your website, your remaining SEO measures are redundant. We'd like to focus on three key areas of technical SEO to improve your website's ranking:
Website indexability
Indexability is related to the ability of search engine spiders to navigate your site.
One of the most important things to take into account is duplicate content. Note that, duplicate content is an absolute ban for SEO. Unfortunately, it is sometimes unavoidable. However, you can tell Google not to crawl those relevant pages.
Reconsider 301 links
Another way to make your website indexable is to make sure there are as few 301 redirects as possible. A 301 redirect is used when a visitor or search engine lands on a URL whose content has been permanently moved to another URL. The visitor is then redirected to the correct page.
Stop linking to insecure domains
Linking to insecure domains is disadvantageous in many ways and search engines recognize this. Google recently took a step toward a "safer Internet." However, it alerts users when they visit HTTP websites or websites that are not HTTPS secure. For the safety of your visitors and to improve your website's ranking, you should avoid directing your visitors to unsafe domains.
Avoid Cascading Style Sheets and HTML validation errors
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used in web documents to define their appearance and display in the browser. CSS validation is the process of verifying that your CSS is properly formatted according to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards.
Improve website and page speed
According to various studies, users expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less. The longer it takes for a page to load, the more likely it is that visitors will leave the page.
If a website has a high bounce rate over a period of time, it informs search engines that the site is not offering users what they need. With long page load times, search engines crawl fewer pages on your website, resulting in fewer pages being indexed.
Get creative with the 404 status code
We've all landed on a 404 page before. If a user lands on a 404 page and immediately returns to the search engine, it indicates that visitors cannot find the content on your website. This can negatively affect your ranking. Make sure your server is displaying the correct status code and reduce errors to reduce the negative impact on the website's SEO.
3. The user experience influences the SEO of a website
How your visitors perceive your website is extremely important. Search engines look at how effectively the information in your website's links and images are used to enhance the user experience.
Page depth navigation
Rule of thumb: for high rankings, websites should not exceed a page depth of five.
Page depth is the number of clicks a visitor needs to reach a certain page from your homepage. For example, a page that is linked from the home page has a depth of two and a page that is linked from there has a depth of three, and so on.
Pages with more than five depths are rarely or not crawled by search engines because they are harder to find, and therefore have lower rankings. Therefore, pay special attention to how you link to pages internally.
Visuals and site accessibility
Search engines use alt attributes to describe what an image represents and what it is used for on a website. An image alt attribute is not only useful for SEO, but also for visually impaired visitors who rely on screen readers to describe a page.
Learn how to use alt text and supplement your website images with short but informative text that expresses exactly what the image represents.
4. Improve the mobile use of your website
It is obvious that our society can no longer be imagined without mobile devices. As a result, B2C and e-commerce companies, in particular, need to create websites with responsive design.
Mobile speed
As soon as the loading time of a mobile website increases by just two seconds, the visitor bounce rate increases by 32%. Thus, a slow mobile loading process not only affects your conversion rates, but also causes search engines to rank your page lower in search results. So for higher rankings, you need to optimize the user experience of your mobile website.
Mobile usability
Pay attention to font size and spacing. Font sizes range from 15 to 18 pixels on most websites. Anything else is difficult to read, especially on mobile devices and for elderly or visually impaired users. So a font that is too small can cause visitors to leave your website prematurely.
The best way to ensure that your font size is readable on mobile devices is to incorporate a responsive design into your CSS file.
Conclusion
We know that SEO brings some challenges. So use our four tips and improve your ranking. If you're not sure what you could improve on your website, an SEO audit can help. With an audit, you can know exactly where your website's strengths and weaknesses lie.