SEO is evolving. Between Google’s constant updates and users demanding higher quality content, it’s vital that your website is always on its toes.
Let’s face it, SEO can be pretty demanding and complicated. But, I’m going to show you six things you can implement right now to make your website more search engine friendly and hopefully help you climb your way up the rankings .
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into sites that have been supposedly ‘optimized’ but doesn’t contain these six vital functions.
1) Fix Canonicalization:
– Canonicalization could be one of the biggest factors in your site ranking properly. If your site isn’t properly indexed in search engines, you could be missing out on major traffic.
Well, what is canonicalization? Canonicalization is when Google and search engines consider your site to be more than one site because there are multiple URL’s that can be used to get to your content.
For example,
Example.com
www.example.com
example.com/index
www.example.com/index
All of these are the same page with the same content, but have multiple URL’s to get to it. This is a huge mistake.
Google views this as if it is four different sites. This means that if you have links pointing to different variations, you aren’t pulling in all of your link juice to one powerful URL.
So, how do you fix it?
You must use a 301 redirect to ensure the different variation point to one central URL so Google can know that this is one site. You have two options here, you can point the site to,
Example.com or www.example.com
SEO experts always recommend the www.example.com version.
If you already have links floating around out there, this could make them all point to one place and make your website a lot more powerful so you can rank higher.
To do this all you must do is enter a code into your .htaccess file in the public_html folder of your server.
To Redirect URL’s non-www to www
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
To Redirect index.html/.php to www or non-www
RewriteRule ^index(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com [L,R=301]
And that should do it! Now you’re ready to rank higher and make a better experience for your users.
2) Create Sitemaps (.html, .xml, video)
– Sitemaps are the bread and butter of all of your pages ranking well. There are two sitemaps that you should pay attention to. One is the .xml sitemap, this is the sitemap that you create and submit it to Google Webmaster tools. This is how you make sure Google is able to crawl all of your websites pages.
Also make sure you drop the sitemap.xml file into your public_html folder. You can easily craft an xml sitemap at http://www.sitemapdoc.com/.
The other sitemap you should implement is an html sitemap. Putting a link to your sitemap.html page on the bottom of every page, you are allowing Google’s crawlers to have full access to every page on your website.
By Google being able to fully crawl all of your pages, your sitemap allows for all of your link juice to flow through all of your pages, producing higher rankings. Make your free html sitemap at http://www.sitemapdoc.com/.
Bloggers can use the Google XML sitemap plugin to create sitemaps for blogs.
3) Add Social Plug-ins
– Google +, Google +, Google +. Social media is becoming a huge indicator for search engines to rank pages. By adding social plug-ins to your site, you’re encouraging people to share your content and send positive signals to Google.
Google + is the biggest indicator to Google. Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t allow Google to collect all of their signals from third party sites.
Google knew that to increase its search quality, it needed to have social data that helped drive rankings. Thus, Google + was born. The +1 feature is showing to have a huge impact on rankings. And, you can assure that Google will only to continue to look to social signals for ranking criteria.
Integrating Facebook like’s, Tweets and +1’s is showing great returns on investments for search rankings and pulling in referral traffic. If you want to stay ahead of the wave and have a great competitive advantage, start leveraging the power of social media now.
4) Get Interactive!
– Make your website a multimedia powerhouse. Make it a site that users land on and look up an hour later and notice they just can’t get off of your site.
How do you do this? Make it interactive.
I can’t tell you how many websites I run into daily with just a bunch of text that puts the reader to sleep.
Make your site sticky by throwing in some videos , pictures, case studies, testimonials and tools. The great thing about videos and video sitemaps is that your videos can rank in results as well! Image having a page and video rank on the first page, that’s power.
Making your site more interactive makes visitors stay on your site longer, which decreases your bounce rates.
Bounce rates are a HUGE indicator to Google to determine search rankings.
Google is also looking at the type of content to media ratio you have on your page and they are sensing the amount of media people love.
There primary goal is to provide their searchers with the best content, so they’ll be looking to feed them more sites that are going to engage them and be of value.
Get interactive!
5) Make it Fast!
– Speed optimization is only going to be weighed more heavily from now on. We are in a world of instant gratification and super computers that you can carry in your pocket.
We want everything now! So you can expect Google to be weighing speed even more in the future. Google is already considering how fast your site is and how fast you can deliver data to their searchers.
If your site isn’t optimized for speed and you didn’t spend much time making it fast, they could be thinking that you probably didn’t speed as much time fabricating the content as well.
Here’s a great way to make your site faster,
The GZipCompression Utility: This is the bread and butter of speed optimization. This compresses your site (in a safe way) to make it easier for browsers to digest and deliver to your users.
Some hosting providers provide this function right in your cPanel. By Gzipping, you can also have more traffic on your site without affecting their speed as much and can increase your site speed by more than 200%. Want to know if your site is already Gzipped? Check out this GZip test
Google also has done a great job explaining this, here’s the video
6) Write Killer Headlines
– This is more along the lines of conversion optimization, but what is SEO all about? Not just getting traffic, but getting targeted traffic and converting them.
Once you get all of this traffic to your site, it’s up to you to make them do what you want them to. One way to get them locked in is to make killer headlines .
Think about magazines in the grocery store, notice they’re right at the register. Their job is to get you so intrigued in the matter of minutes that you by their magazine from just viewing it in a line. We can learn a lot from them.
I encourage you to take a look at those magazines covers and see how they make killer headlines that compels their target market to pick it up and buy it.
The secret to headlines is speaking directly to your target market and honestly think to yourself “would I read this?”.
By doing these six things, you will be well on your way to ranking higher in search engines and turning visitors into profit.
Image credit:Merve Menekse
28 comments
Thanks for sharing these seo tips. I am a newbie and it will really useful for me.
Me too. Although I have been blogging and even creating websites for years, I still consider myself a newbie when it comes to SEO. I have learned a lot of things from you today, Mike.
Thanks for this article, but what about the content.
Content is important. Since Google Panda, you want to make sure you avoid thin content and have at least 400 words per page. Content is critical for conversion optimization.
Obviously, Content is King. Attaching an Image, Videos in the post are good idea, however, images tend to adversely affect the load time of the site. I usually prefer to use 1 or 2 images on the article. Of course, it hugely depends on the type of an article I write about. For better speed, user must compress the image too.
Your right Ricky, compressing images can save on load times. Using multiple images usually isn’t a problem is the site is GZipped. The text should load first so it won’t make too much of a difference.
Yes, media is important to keep visitors. I use a featured image image on every post, and this image is also shown on the front page of the blog.
I am sure creating videos can give a huge amount of traffic, and I have been planing to start on videos for a long time(its on the top of my priortys right now)…
Videos really add alot of value to the content. Also try using Infographics and other different vehicles to drive engagement.
I’ve done some steps that you write. But I still struggled to make my blog load faster. Maybe I need to remove some unnecessary plugins from my blog.. thanks for share..
If you’ve already GZipped and compressed images. You may want to cut down on plugins. They can slow you down tremendously. You can also consider a cache plugin for Wordpress or using a content delivery network (CDN). hope that helps!
From my opinion these all are very important tips for achieve high PR in search engines and i think these things we should notice as much as possible :
1. Content
2. Speed of site
3.Attraction.
I agree. Those are all important elements!
Great Post. Very informative. This information should save many brand new internet marketers from making the common mistake of believing all the mis leading get rich quick schemes that are being advertised all over the internet. It is refreshing to read honest internet marketing information instead of all the false promises that so many blog posters write. Have A Wonderful Day Corine Miller
Thanks Corine! This could be very refreshing for seasoned marketers and brand new marketers alike. You can always learn something great with understanding that you can always learn.
Great post. No one likes a high bounce rate, but I never knew it had an impact on SERPs. I suppose it stands to reason, a measure of relevancy.
As ever, content is king. We hear it time and again, and yet it is the one which most struggle with.
Your right, content is king. Google is using so many different metrics to determine rankings it’s mind blowing. If we stick to providing content that educates, speaks benefits and is selfless, great content will be all the more easier to create.
Great post! We recently used GTMetrix.com to analyze the performance of our site. We cleaned up the code and now we are supper fast. Lots of more traffic! Speed optimization is the key!
That’s great to hear!!
Thanks for sharing these seo tips and i can expect Google to be weighing speed even more in the future. i can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site.
They definitely will. They are always looking to involve factors that determine the users experience.
These are useful tips to put in action for getting some immediate SEO results. I know the things excepting only #5, and the video has enough information to catch these points in mind.
I glad the video helped you. They are really great for explanation and engagement!
Love your tips, Mike. I am aware of most of these, but just have not got the time to sit down and implement them.
Perhaps I can try to make my website faster by gzipping the pages. What do you think? I would like to hear your personal recommendations.
Thanks, ya!
Thanks for reading the article. I would definitely recommend first GZipping the site. Then if you can, compress the images to be a small size without losing alot of resolution and quality. You can then use image sprites to cut down on time.
You also can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or you can upgrade your hosting provider and get a dedicated server. There’s alot of options for you other there. But GZipping should solve most peoples problems with a moderate amount of traffic.
Driving traffic into a website can be done by Internet advertisement campaigns too. But the advantage of SEO over such campaigns is that such ads may cost you money, time and energy again and again. So it is very essential that web designers understand the vast opportunities of search engine optimization and incorporate such design parameters so as to make the site highly visible..
Great post…!
Interaction with visitors and speed is very important for desired results after SEO process. These are useful tips for getting SEO results. And these tips must be followed for achieving high page rank in search engine.
I think posting in high page rank sites and do-follow sites give fast results to come in top of SERP
We are in top of the SERP within 15 days…
I think speed of site is very important, and not easy to get faster speed for my site too..