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
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