This article captures the Top 10 Great SEO Tips To Increase Traffic to Your Website. A sound and fully optimized website technical environment is critical and a great priority when it comes to SEO and capturing strong organic traffic levels.
If you don’t have your
website SEO set up correctly, your content will not get crawled, so it’s
useless and pointless to not focus on your website technology first and
foremost. Websites are usually managed via a content management system housed on a website server.
Both the content
management system and website server have an important influence on how search
engines crawl your content when reaching your website. Most SEO crawling tools
and SEO platforms look at these key areas as part of their auditing features.
Top 10 Great SEO
Tips To Increase Traffic To Your Website
There are some
important areas that must be “set up” correctly to ensure the ideal crawling of
your website. Let’s take a look at the Top 10 Great SEO Tips To Increase
Traffic to Your Website.
1. Redirects
Redirects are used
when a page has been moved to a different location or URL. These can be
temporary or permanent. There are many kinds of redirects, but it’s important
to know that search engines recognize and pass SEO value only for permanent
redirects.
These are also
called 301 redirects (whereas temporary ones are called 302
redirects). If you are using a redirect for temporary purposes, it should
be flagged and evaluated as to why you are using it and for how long.
2. URL Structures
URLs are an important
area for search engines. The actual URL string provides a unique identification
for the page, almost like your national identification number. Additionally,
URLs are a key area search engines look to when identifying what the page is
about. In fact, it is critical that URLs and their folder structures include
keywords. It’s also best to use hyphens when separating terms.
Hyphens communicate to
search engines to separate out the terms versus merging them and ranking them
for the merged phrase search results. Additionally, the closer to the root
folder of the URL, which is the folder closest to the .com, the more emphasis
the keyword gets.
3. Web page and
Website load time
How quickly a web page
loads, or page speed, is one of the most important ranking factors right now.
The top search engine ranking is typically dominated by
faster-loading pages, especially on mobile devices that are at the center of
Google’s design. Furthermore, quick-loading pages positively affect user
experience and may increase your conversion rates.
Google will reduce
your search engine rankings if your site or web page loads slowly. Slow load
time is typically attributed to your server performance and the density of your
web page’s HTML code.
Keep code simple,
clean, and easy to process.
4. XML sitemap and
robots.txt files
XML sitemaps and
robots.txt files are files that allow you to communicate to search engines the
web pages that should get into the search results and rankings.
Be sure to leverage
your CMS tools to build a complete XML sitemap and robots.txt files and have
them validated and submitted via Google’s Search Console tool.
5. Broken pages or
404 errors
A 404 error
page means that a web page is not accessible or is no longer there. This
is usually a result of a broken link or a link using the wrong URL for a web
page.
The 404 error hampers
the user experience by preventing a user from connecting to the desired page.
Because of this, websites that produce many 404 errors can lead to a drop in
SEO rankings and traffic.
6. Duplicate
content
Duplicate content was
one of Google’s original spam checks and part of its algorithm early on. Web
pages are considered duplicates if their content is 80 percent or more similar.
Sites that have duplicate content are usually significantly affected by
penalties and lower search engine rankings.
Sometimes duplicate
content happens by accident due to CMS or URL structuring reasons, so it’s
important to ensure there is only one URL created for a web page.
7. Page linking
Page linking within a
website is extremely important. Search engines follow them while crawling the
site, and the anchor text that links use are another area search engines look
to for determining what a page is about (also called relevancy).
Every page should have
at least one internal link pointing to it and should include the term that
you’d like the page to rank for in the anchor text. It’s also recommended that
the number of links to a page from within a site (not external sites) be no
more than 3,000.
8. SEO meta tags
HTML tags are
extremely important to search engines. They explain what your site is about,
what to display in the search engine result copy it ranks for, and what type of
page it is (recipe, product page, etc.). Each page should have its own unique
set of tags. Similar to duplicate content, tag duplication can be a big
hindrance to search engine rankings.
9. HTTPS encryption
Providing users with a
secure website has become a top priority to search engines. Security has become
part of the search engine ranking algorithm. Google says, “HTTPS is an internet
communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data
between the user’s computer and site”
Websites that do not
support HTTPS connections should expect a lower ranking in search engine results
and be surpassed by sites that are using HTTPS in search results.
10. Page layout and
text usage
The top-ranking pages
typically offer long-form content, so it’s important that your pages have a lot
of text around a given subject. Search engines tend to reward fast-loading
pages that offer a lot of basic text copy (some even more than 500
words) with the top rankings.
Be sure your web pages
offer a lot of text, especially in the “above the fold of the page” area, or
the area at the top of the page that is initially displayed upon loading,
without scrolling. Copy that’s within an image does not count since search
engines have a difficult time reading the image and typically just scan a page
and extract basic HTML text.
In Conclusion, these are the key “website SEO environment” areas that take top priority. Be sure these are set up and implemented correctly.