Simple Steps to Prepare Your Website for Success on the Search Engines

 

Simple Steps to Prepare Your Website for Success on the Search Engines

One of the biggest assets that you can leverage for growth is your website, but just putting one up and hoping for the best won’t cut it. There are a few basic steps you can take to prep your website so that it’s more likely to perform well on search engines. It’s important to note that these are just the initial steps to get your website to a base level of quality, but there are many further actions you can take to improve your website’s performance. However, these actions will be a great start for getting your website in front of more people looking for what you offer.

Resolve Any Technical Issues with Your Site

Having technical problems with your site is a sure way to kill traffic and reduce your standings with the search engines. Search engines are all about user experience and technical issues detract significantly from the quality of that experience, not to mention that it makes your business look much less professional than businesses with high quality websites. Here are a few common issues to look out for:

Any issues with how users interact with your site should be obvious by just going to your site and interacting with it. Look for text that’s hard to read, images that might cover text, cutoff or stretched/ distorted images, buttons that don’t work, etc. If you’re running your own site through a CMS, these issues can be fixed through there.

You have multiple versions of pages on your site, especially your homepage. There are a couple ways you can look into whether your site has this problem. The first is to check common variations of your URL: www.yoursite.com, http://yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, http://yoursite.com/index, etc. If you find that you are running into this issue, then set up the alternate pages to redirect to the right URL. The second is to check the Google for what pages are eligible for searches. To do this, type in site:yoursite.com into the search bar and Google will show which pages can show on search.

Customize your Error 404 page. You can find what your error page looks like by searching for a page that doesn’t exist on your domain. Then create a custom error 404 page and set up a redirect to it. This will ensure that even if users encounter any issues that lead them to an error page with your site, it will still be a better experience than a generic error page.

Make Your Load Time as Fast as Possible

A slow site load time will have a huge impact on user experience and site interaction. The most commonly used sites generally have really fast load times and, because of this, people expect sites of quality businesses to be fast. For every second slower that your landing page takes to load, your bounce rate increases by a significant amount. The good news is that Google has a tool to help increase your speed; https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Build Your Site Size

The more content and points of interaction that increase the user experience, the better your site will perform. This could come in the form of blogs, videos, lists, infographics, webinars, etc. Increasing the amount of content and the number of pages on your site, increases the likelihood of your site ranking well on search. It’s important that this content be highly engaging in order to grab people’s attention and keep them on your site. Creating lots of high quality content is challenging, but well worth the effort. When creating content, its vital to know who you’re making the content for, knowing your audience will help you make content that keeps people hanging out on your site. Your audience will determine what kind of content will perform well, blogs may grab the attention of a certain demographic more so than others for example. It’s a good idea to develop a content creation strategy ad calendar.

If you take these simple steps, you should see an increase in traffic to your site, but this is just the beginning. There are many more things you can do to improve your rankings, both technical and not. The actions laid out here will give your site a great start.

Direct Placement, LLC is a digital marketing agency that offers a variety of digital ads and services. Our trained and certified team of Account Managers and Internet Marketing Advertisers is dedicated to helping your business achieve its advertising goals. They will work diligently with you to help ensure our advertising efforts are tailored to your specific needs. Contact Direct Placement, LLC today or visit our website to discover how we can start transforming your business one click at a time! You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Blogger for more online marketing related content.

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