We are four months into the new year and it is the right time to give your SEO a spring clean so you can boost your search engine rankings in 2018. Even though, link building and creating engaging content might be your top priority but there are other ways that can deliver exceptional results too that most businesses does not pay attention to.
1. Take The Responsive Route
With Google pushing its weight behind mobile friendly websites by launching a separate mobile index, businesses have no choice but to take a responsive route or get penalized by Google. In fact, Google has made responsiveness of a website as a ranking factor for mobile index. Apart from its search engine benefits, responsive website plays an important role in delivering a perfect user experience on mobile devices. Google has started crackdown against non-mobile friendly website and has started to push them down the search index.
2. Write SEO Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions
According to Copyblogger, 80% people will read your headline and only 20% will read the content. This means that you should pay extra attention to constructing magnetic headlines. That is only half piece of the puzzle and the other piece of the puzzle is creating search engine friendly tittles. Not only your Meta title and Meta description attractive to read for users but it is crafted according to the guidelines of search engines to make it more search engine friendly. Remember your Meta title and Meta descriptions appears in Google search and help users decide whether to click on a link or not. Make the most of every character you have to persuade users to click on your link.
3. Page Speed Does Matter
Come July 2018, Google will also make page speed a ranking factor for its mobile search index. More importantly, page speed also plays an important role in determining the overall user experience of your website. The better the user experience of your website, the more time user spend on your website and the more chances you have to rank higher in search engine rankings. Shaving a few seconds off your website page load times can make a big difference to your bounce rate and conversion rate. You can easily minimize your page load times by merging CSS and JavaScript files, reducing HTTP calls, optimizing media files on your website, using caching or by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
4. Internal and External Linking
With dynamic nature of today’s websites, the content on your website is modified frequently. This could result in your internal links pointing to missing or irrelevant pages. Scan your websites internal links and make sure that they point to the right destination. Same holds true for external links. You have included a link to an external source in your content and that website is no longer functional.
Imagine what would happen if your readers click on that link while reading your content and see an error message. It will leave a bad taste in their mouth. Watch out for all those inbound and outbound links and fix them before it can negatively affect your visibility on search engines.
5. Keep An Eye For Broken Links
Just like external links, there are chances that your website might have some broken links. It might be due to any reason but you do not want your users to direct to a dead page or an irrelevant page due to broken link. There is also a possibility that you might end up linking to a bad website you do not want to be connected to. Scan your website for broken links with a tool like with Screaming Frog and make sure that all points take your users to a relevant destination in one step, without needing redirects.
Which SEO tactics do you use to increase your search engine rankings? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.