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Search engine optimization (SEO) is more important than ever. With Google’s ever-increasing focus on quality content, SEO has become vital for any successful marketing strategy. SEO is now more important because Google’s algorithm is ever-increasingly focused on delivering the best content to its users.
Not optimizing crucial technical aspects of your site that affect page speed, indexing, and more could lead to lost traffic and revenue.
Fortunately, it’s easy to avoid these common mistakes. All it takes is a little education and attention to detail. This post will find everything you need to know about optimizing your website for higher search rankings and more traffic.
Are You Using Proper Site Architecture?
Site architecture is foundational because it sets up the rest of your website. If you don’t optimize for search performance, any page on the site has a reduced chance of being crawled and ultimately convert into a revenue-driving asset.
Having a solid site architecture also has SEO benefits, like making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. You can create a solid site architecture with a hierarchy through the way you organize your content.
Creating a logical flow through your site makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site and index your content. The easiest way to improve the flow of your site is to organize your content in a way that makes sense.
- What are the main topics of your website?
- What keywords are most relevant to your content?
- What categories does your website fit into?
- What about the architecture of your content?
- What format does it take?
Can Search Engines Crawl Your Pages?
Setting up your site to be crawled by search engines is just as important as making sure your pages are accessible to users. You can optimize your site for search engines by making sure your URLs are structured to be crawlable, creating site maps to help crawlers navigate your site, and providing information about your content for search engines to display in search results.
Your pages should be accessible to search engines and users via valid status codes. Ensure that the pages you want to be indexed have a 200 HTTP status code. Make sure that your robots.txt files don’t block any of those same pages from being seen by crawlers in the first place. A misplaced disallow directive could prevent crawlers from seeing your page at all!
Also, make sure you’re using the noindex meta tag to prevent indexing of pages you don’t want to appear in search results. Like with the robots.txt file, one misplaced noindex directive can cause major problems.
It’s also good to make sure your sitemap isn’t blocking any important pages. You can do this by updating your sitemap to reflect any changes in your site architecture.
Do Your Pages Allow Indexing?
Your site may be crawlable, but if your pages are not indexable, they won’t show up when people search for them.
There are a few ways to ensure your site’s pages are indexable. First, make sure your site is run through a site audit tool to ensure your site is set up to be crawlable.
Robots tags allow search engines to crawl your pages and index them so users can discover them. There are many different types of robots tags, but the most common type is a no-index/no-follow tag.
Make sure your robots tag reflects how you want the page displayed in search results.
Lastly, make sure your site is indexable to ensure every page has a unique URL.
The bottom line here is that you need to make sure that your robots tags allow for indexing.
Have You Improved the Page Experience?
What does your page experience look like to your visitors?
Spend time trying to understand your customers’ needs and expectations.
- What answers are they looking for?
- What problems are they trying to solve?
- What are their pain points?
- How does your produce or service make their lives better?
Once you know what your customers want, you can create an experience that meets their expectations and exceeds them.
Creating an experience on your site that exceeds customer expectations requires a bit of creativity. What can you do to minimize customers’ effort to get what they need from your company? Start by thinking about how you can make using your site easier.
Another thing that influences your site experience is page speed.
Site speed is just another thing that we all have to worry about when optimizing your technical structures. Slow-loading pages may not be a problem for some people, but they can discourage others. Doing so will help keep customers happy and encourage them to continue browsing your site rather than giving up before conversion occurs.
By providing a great experience on your site, you’ll increase the odds of converting visitors into customers.
What’s Your SEO Score?
Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.
