In 2021, search engine rankings can make or break your business more than ever. If you rank high on search engine results pages, you’re more likely to attract more traffic to your website. And every brand knows why increasing web traffic is vital.
When more users visit your website, you have more chances of turning them into paying customers. However, if you don’t rank well on search engines, your potential target may not know you exist. Don’t just wait for them to find your business by chance. Instead, ensure you appear on their search engines by considering the following search engine optimization (SEO) tips:
One factor that can affect your SEO ranking is the speed of your website. If you have a slow site, you’re increasing your bounce rate. And search engine crawlers take into account how long people stay on your website.
Having a high bounce rate means more people are exiting from your website. They don’t stay long because of many reasons, and the number one factor is how fast your site loads.
Two seconds or less is the ideal site speed that consumers expect. If it loads for more than three seconds, they’re more likely to close your site. When you lose traffic, you may decrease your potential of making sales.
Moreover, search engines consider your site speed as a ranking factor. That’s why you need to ensure that you have a speedy website.
You may want to use speed optimization plugins on your website to increase its speed. If you’re a WordPress user, there are many WordPress speed plugins you can take advantage of.
These plugins perform caching wherein it stores cached files of the user’s visited web pages. With these, your visitors can easily receive data from the cache when visiting a page as the system no longer has to load it from a server. Thus, loading speed is reduced.
And the best part about speed plugins like this is it doesn’t have to deal with unnecessary server traffic that can reduce your site’s load time. This is especially true when using a shared hosting plan, as there are more users.
Aside from site speed, it’s also important to have a mobile-friendly website. Don’t focus solely on making your site load fast on desktops because there are more mobile users nowadays. That means that more traffic will come from mobile users.
Search engines like Google give importance to mobile indexing. That means you can rank well if your site is accessible in various screen sizes.
When people talk about mobile-friendly sites, they’re referring to sites that load fast when accessed through mobile devices. It should run smoothly whatever screen size your user has. Your site should have the following features to ensure that it’s mobile-friendly:
Another way to rank high on search engines is to link to authoritative and relevant pages. When you link to other sites, you make your site a more scalable and valuable resource.
Thus, you may want to create content that you can link to other websites. Moreover, when you link to other sites, you’re helping them get tagged as trustworthy, credible, and authoritative. This is similar to voting them as relevant and an authority in the industry. The more links one gets, the more chances they have of improving their ranking.
However, the quality of links also matters—not just the quantity. Search engines evaluate the links if they’re from authentic sites. If search engines identify the links as fake, it can reduce their ranking. Worse, one can get a penalty.
But you may wonder how linking to other websites helps your ranking. Sites can track links from other sites, and they may notice you linking to them. Since you’re doing it for free, they may appreciate such a gesture. As a result, they may also link back to you, especially if you have quality and relevant content.
As mentioned, having more sites link back to you is like getting voted as a trustworthy site. This will help search engines rank you well.
You may also want to help visitors and search engines know what your site is all about by using meta descriptions and title tags properly. Thus, you may want to use ‘<title>’ at the start and end of your title.
That way, search engines will know what your site is all about. They can rank you on keywords that consumers use when searching for relevant content.
Moreover, whatever you write in the title tag is the one that will also appear on search engine results pages.
While images can help your website’s aesthetics, they can also help with your ranking. You can also use infographics to generate backlinks for people to use. It can help increase your conversion rate when done correctly. That’s why using them on your website is essential.
To entice your visitors to use your infographics, you need to make great content and design. It also helps to write high-quality content with at least 2,000 words to help you rank better.
Ranking high on search engines is essential to drive more traffic to your business. Without a high rank, you may not appear on the first page in search engine results. The worst thing about this is that people are unlikely to click on the second and succeeding search engine results pages. That means it’s important to have your site appear on the first pages of search engines to increase your chances of having more leads.
Ashley is obsessed with SEO and WordPress. He is also the founder of Mad Lemmings. When he is not busy helping clients get higher on Google he can be found doing crazy sports in the Swiss Alps (or eating too much chocolate - a habit he is trying to break).