SEO 101 – Improve Your Website Ranking

To fix what is broken, you must first know what is broken. This is where an SEO Audit Checklist comes in. With the help of this, you can get a clearer picture as to how best to improve your site’s ranking on SERPs and get ahead of your competitors.

Google alone has approximately 200 ranking factors, typically:

• Does your website load fast?
• Has your content been optimized with relevant keywords?
• Have you attached alt tags to your images?
• Does your website have any broken links?

Ranking

Accessibility is crucial. Google and other search engines must know your website exists. Google bots should be able to access your site content to be able to index it. Your robots.txt file, XML sitemap and HTTP status codes are needed to allow search engine crawlers to access and index your site.

Content

Your website’s content plays a significant role in improving your engagements. Follow the points listed out below to upgrade your website ranking.

• The Bucket Brigades technique used by copy-writers involves breaking one concept into multiple sentences, bringing importance to the points that matter.
• Make sure you format your content. Use paragraphs, sub-headers, bullet points, etc. to enhance readability.
• As mentioned before, unique content will play to your strength. Content with the right keywords, placed strategically is what is needed.

Images

Images help you break content into different sections and add an interactive element. Here are some more factors to consider with pictures on your website:

• Make sure your images on the website have the right alt tags as well as informative, relevant file names.
• Another factor to look into with images is dimensions. Ensure while uploading images, they fit the dimensions of your website template so they look neat and clean.
• Using pictures throughout your website helps to show an idea instead of trying to tell it through text. Infographics, icons, and designed typography can make your website more interesting.

Bots

Google’s bots are thorough. They crawl through all your pages and rank you based on whether your content is unique or not. Any plagiarism will have a negative effect and that will affect your results. (This problem most often faced by E-Commerce websites due to the nature of their content)

Loading Speed

A user will wait a maximum of 3 seconds on average for a website to load before closing the tab or end up switching tabs. Increasing your site’s speed and also its responsiveness is a necessity.

Titles and Descriptions

Your website’s pages should have relevant titles and descriptions. The recommended length is 30-65 characters for titles and 100-150 characters for descriptions. These should be unique for each page.

Responsiveness

We have entered the mobile era of technology requiring your websites to be responsive. With the launch of Google’s mobile crawler back in 2015, website responsiveness is a must.

Bounce Rate

This is the rate or percentage of people leaving your website within 40 seconds. To improve this, you can use heat maps to figure out why, and from which part of your website predominantly, your potential clients are leaving.

Broken Links

You cannot have any broken links in your website. Make sure all the pages have proper re-directs and/or have been deleted.