How Do I Improve my Website’s SEO? (Part 3 of 3)

Hello again, here’s part three in my three-part series “How to Improve My Website’s SEO.” If you missed part one or part two here you go… Onwards!!

Part three…

• Fast-loading pages: User experience plays an important role in ranking your website in organic search results. Remember, if Google Search serves good content and websites to users, those users are likely to continue using their search engine. So try your best to make sure your pages are loading as fast as possible. A few things you can do to dramatically speed up the load-times of your website are:
  • Optimised Images & Video: This is usually the number issue contributing towards poor performance on websites, consider optimsing your images and videos for your web pages.
  • Minified JavaScript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): Minify your CSS and JS files. By reducing them in size, they will increase the initial load times of your pages.
  • Mobile-friendly optimised site: Does your website work (or look good) on a mobile or tablet device? Consider their screen-sizes and only what needs to be served on pages when viewing on these device types. You can test whether your web pages are mobile-friendly using this nifty Mobile-Friendly Test Tool by Google. Just so you know; Bing (Microsoft) has a mobile-friendly test tool too.

• Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificates: By encrypting the submitted data on your website you’re making it safer for the person who browses your website, or purchases through your online store. If you have read my post about what SEO is and why it’s important, you will remember that Google wants to keep people using their search engine. So to gain your trust in their product, search engine’s will purposely serve up websites in their search results that are “trusted” or at least websites that have taken simple measures to protect the data being submitted on those websites. So the bottom line is searchbots favour websites with SSL certificates. Still not sure what SSL is, check out this useful video for a good explanation. To get SSL implemented, contact your website hosting company or get in touch with us.
• Different Content Types: Besides your keyword-rich pages, try to use other content types such as blog posts, articles, photo galleries, multi-page guides and video. That said, make sure the additional content types you display have a good context and correlation with the page’s text. Think of your focus page keywords and show only alternative content that relates.
• Submit your Sitemaps: Ensure your website outputs a sitemap containing the web pages you want search bots to index. Submit your sitemaps to Google Search Console (Google Webmasters) and/or Bing Webmaster Tools. As content is added and updated on your website, search engines will be more aware of these changes and index your website sooner. The more frequently website content is added and updated, the better.
• Local Search Results: Search engines like Google and Bing are increasingly serving up results to users that are more relevant to their locality. Imagine you are hungry and want to quickly find the best burger joint in your town. You turn to Google Search, but the results show restaurants on the other side of the planet. Not very helpful – and you’re still hungry! So to keep you using their search engine, search engine’s will usually favour websites (or businesses) that are relevant to the locality you are searching from. Here are items to consider to help ensure search engines serve up your web pages to the right audience:
  • Domain Name Suffix: This is the last part of your web address (EG: ending in .au, .uk, .ca, .in, .za etc…) If you have a business that serves a particular country, get a domain name that matches that country. You are more likely to appear in search results in that country.
  • Local Hosting Provider: If your business serves a particular city or region (EG: Go Cart; a web design business in Perth, Western Australia) then do your best to host your website with a popular and reliable hosting provider in that same city (or country at least). You are more likely to appear in local search results for that city or country.
  • Website Localisation: Make sure your website or specific pages are configured to target the language and culture of the audience you expect to see them. EG: If your website serves a UK English-speaking audience, make sure your language is set to en-GB. In the USA it should be en-US. For Dutch (or Flemish) speakers in Belgium it should be nl-BE. Or German content in Spain use de-ES…  So consider your locale and language wisely as you are more likely to appear in search results for specific audiences when this is set correctly.
  • Other: Other hints to searchbots as to the intended audience of your site can include local addresses and phone numbers on your pages, the use of your local currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google My Business.

That is it! I hope you have found my three-part “How to Improve My Website’s SEO?” series useful (part one, part two, part three). If you need a hand with your website or online store’s SEO, reach out, Go Cart are always happy to help.

Have a great day!