Website Review #3: Improving Your SEO and Page Load Speeds

SEO and Page Load Speed are absolutely crucial for any website out there.

And in today’s review, we are going to be looking at both of these topics in-depth.

I was contacted by Rohit Sharma to review his website and try to help him get more traffic and improve the SEO on his site.

There are no simple solutions when it comes to SEO as we all know well. Especially when Google keeps changing the rules.

But if you approach it in the right way, follow the basics, and always keep a few key things in mind, you can achieve some good SEO results.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of Rohit’s question, I wanted to go over a few website basics like layout, color and so on.

Website Layout

It is important to attract people to your website. And once you do that, it is even more important to keep them there (or at least not scare them away).

Website visitors make a decision in the first 5 seconds about whether they want to stay or not.

With that in mind, let’s get started.

The following is the homepage of Rohit’s site (split into two because it is long)

Above: A split screen of the homepage (left is the top, right is below that)

When I look at Rohit’s site TechnoR.com, my first impression is as follows:

1. There is too much-wasted space at the top of the page.  

I would move the logo up and reduce the hello bar a little. This will help show more content.

* The lost space at the top is completely empty, so I assume there was no specific reason for it.

2. You have two sidebars with a confusing amount of content on the home page.

The second sidebar is dedicated to advertising, something I don’t recommend unless it really brings you a lot of money (ie. more than $10 a month). Google Adwords rarely does for small-medium sites.

You are better at cleaning up your site (removing this) and attracting more readers. Then later on, when you have a large audience, you can ad Google Adwords or Mediavine or Ezoic ads or even your own products.

Win your readers over first, then start to think about money.

I recommend combining the two sidebars, keeping:

• the search bar
• the newsletter subscription
• recent/favourite posts
• Facebook widget (if it is getting you likes, otherwise remove it)

3. The white text on the post images is not really legible (readable).

You need contrasting colors (eg. dark on light, or vice versa) in order to have text on images. I presume this is built into your theme, but it is not adding value for your readers. They have to struggle to know what the text says and what the post is about. This is losing you readers. 

If you cannot change this by adding a dark overlay to the images, you need to be conscious about what images you choose for each post. They must be quite dark.

Page Load Speed Does Affect SEO

Before I get started on SEO, which was your main concern with this site, I thought we should discuss your website load times (it actually affects SEO anyway).

Your website loads in more than 5 seconds – tested from Europe and America via Pingdom.

It could be you are targeting readers and hosting in India (I see you are highest ranked for India) but this load speed is too high.

You should be aiming for around 2-3 seconds or better if you can afford it. (many of us cannot)

Fixing Your Page Load Speed Problems

I can see from a quick analysis of your site that you have a number of things that are slowing it down:

• You are loading too many things (Your homepage is over 2MB and you are loading 211 files – images, scripts, CSS etc)
• You have too many images on your page (they are a big problem on all sites)
• The advertising is also taking too long to load (Chikita is the main problem)

I recommend seriously looking at what you have on your homepage, and reducing the advertising. This could halve your page load speed.

Google will love you for this and potentially rank you higher.

SEO is affected by load speed.

Another benefit is: your readers like fast pages too. So they will visit more often and not leave because they are waiting for your pages to load.

SEO and Keyword Research

Solving your page load speeds will help your SEO a lot. But you will not rank for highly competitive keywords with a site that has no authority (which is a problem for most of us).

As I have mentioned on many reviews before, you need to target specific long-tail keywords and do your research before you write your posts.

When I take a look at your last two posts:

• 5 Most Basic Requirements while creating a website
• HTC One M8 Review And Price

I see that you are writing for very difficult keyword areas like mobile phones and creating websites.

By looking at the phrase “HTC One M8 Review” in Market Samurai, I can see that page one of Google is very difficult to achieve for this. So using even longer phrases is crucial

Using Long Tail Keywords

In such a competitive niche you only have the choice of targeting long-tail keywords.

You can use Google Keyword Planner to find similar phrases to the main topic of your post.

Another method some bloggers use it s a keyword suggestion tool like Hit Tail Pro.

I recommend targeting 2 or 3 such phrases in your post to spread the benefits and chance of getting SEO.

Other Tactics for Improving SEO

There are a few tactics that you can use to achieve good SEO even without achieving page one with these words:

• Make sure your social profiles are complete (each one has links to your site) and linked on your site
• Build your followings on one or two social sites (products do well on Pinterest)
• Try new traffic ideas aside from a blog post (Slideshare, infographics, video, hangouts and podcasts)
• Videos on Youtube often rank very well, so make a video for your best blog ideas
• Comment on relevant blogs in your niche (especially those with Comment Luv – and install Comment Luv to attract commenters)

Make Sure Your On-site SEO is Perfect

One of the things you really have a lot of control over is your on-site SEO. These are the elements on your site that Google looks at when indexing your site for search.

You need to make sure that your SEO for each page and post is 100% perfect for the long tail phrases you are targeting.

This great SEO guide from the masters at Moz will help you understand what you need to do.

Using a plugin like SEOPressor can also help you to make sure that you have the keywords in all the right places and with the right keyword density. They also offer to show you lots of similar keywords you can use (similar to Hit Tail Pro).

Final Words

I know you probably wanted some quick fixes and easy answers to ranking high in Google for your site.

But there are none.

In my experience, if you choose the right keywords and check that you can achieve page one on Google using Market Samurai, one in five of your posts has a good chance for traffic.

However, do not rely on Google. You should also be networking with other bloggers in your niche. Commenting on their blogs. Connecting with them on social media and so on.

Relying on any one source of traffic is dangerous.