If you’re new to website ownership, then you may be wondering about the best way to improve your site’s search engine ranking. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a complex process that can seem daunting at first. But with a little knowledge and some simple steps, you can start optimizing your site for better visibility and increased traffic. In this blog post, we’ll outline the basics of SEO and provide tips for getting started. So read on to learn more!
SEO: What is it?
If you are a new website owner, you are undoubtedly feeling a bit overwhelmed, especially with the prospect of needing to improve the rank of your site and understanding what SEO is and how to implement the various strategies. Before continuing, it might be a good idea to get the help of a digital marketing agency, such as cozab.com for example, so that you can begin improving the ranking of your site immediately.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the continued process of optimizing your content and site for search engines. This could be anything from improving the speed of your site to creating guest post content to link your website. The important thing to understand is that it is an ongoing process, much like going to the gym, and not one thing will increase your rankings.
Website Speed
As a new website owner, the first thing that you are going to need to focus on is ensuring that the loading times of your website are not slow. Why? Because 50% of visitors will leave a site if it doesn’t load after 6 seconds, 25% will leave between 4 to 6 seconds, and 19% will leave between 2 to 3 seconds. That means that if your website takes 5 seconds to load, and you receive 100 visitors, you will lose around 69 before they even get into the site.
Site Structure
Another aspect of your website that you need to pay attention to, especially if it is new, is the structure of the site. A good idea would be to plan the structure of your site on a piece of paper before you begin implementing anything, and long before you even think about posting content. Good site structure will help Google’s bots to crawl your site, and it will help users to navigate your site. You should also consider avoiding a single-page design.
Mobile Optimization
Of all the aspects of your site that you should focus on, making sure that it is optimized for mobile users is probably the most important. For example, after 3 seconds, 53% of mobile visitors will leave if the site hasn’t loaded yet. More importantly, more than half of website traffic is now due to mobile users. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by Google, which is why they will crawl the mobile version of a site before the actual desktop version, and sites with optimized mobile versions will rank higher.
Keywords
Now that you have a good idea of what needs to happen before posting content, you need to know what to focus on, which is where keywords come in. Keywords tell search engines what content to expect on your site so that it can be recommended to users. You need to do keyword research to find out what users within your industry are searching for, which means that you will need to get a good idea of who your target audience is. Knowing what your audience is searching for will also help tremendously when creating content.
SSL Encryption
If you take a look at the top corner of this website, you will notice a locked symbol. That means that this site uses SSL encryptions, which is the most popular type of website protection today. Having an SSL encryption will not only increase your ranking, but it will also build trust with your visitors. If you have an e-commerce store that doesn’t make use of SSL encryptions, people are much less likely to buy from you on the site. The primary purpose of SSL encryptions is to ensure that any information being sent and received from your site is safe, so be sure to get it before even performing SEO.
Also published on Medium.
