In this article, we are going to be sharing with you 5 of the easiest and in our eyes, the most important tips for successful SEO. Make sure you take note on these tips and start implementing them as soon as you can.
The main focus of this is based around the content that you are writing or getting written for your business and how you can best optimise it to bring in the desired result. Valuable content is king in the search engines eyes, and we want to help you improve the results from your efforts.
Slow page load times
Page loading speeds is a massive factor in SEO. A few years ago you could get away with a slow loading website. But those days are long gone, there is no excuse for having a slow website anymore. People are getting more and more impatient when they go online and if your site is taking too long to load, you can say goodbye to a good chunk of customers. A slow page speed does more than just losing traffic though, it paints an untrustworthy picture in the mind of your prospects to.
Page speed is crucial to both users and search engines. According to a study by eConsultancy, “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load”. So has that number got you worried?
As your business begins to grow and you start generating more and more leads through SEO, you have to make sure your website is lightning quick, otherwise, you are wasting up to 40% off that traffic!
One quick way to reduce the loading speed is to remove non-essential elements that slow down your site. If your site is on WordPress, have a look through your plugins and delete anything that you aren’t using anymore.
Write to the people reading it
We previously did a blog around the intent of blog writing for SEO. When writing blogs and articles for your business you must keep the reader first in mind and search engines second. The old method of SEO was to just fill your blogs with keywords that rank high on Google in an attempt to get more clicks on your site. While this definitely used to work, you can’t keep doing this, if your content isn’t relevant or doesn’t appeal to the reader you will lose their interest and they will go to the next site. In the search engines eyes, this is bad and you will suffer the consequences in the long run.
You must be writing engaging content for real people. Remember, people are the ones with credit cards ready to purchase your product, not robots. Robots don’t engage with your brand or become loyal customers, humans do.
So, next time you or your colleague is writing content for your business, forget about the search engines when doing so. You will find that your content will become more helpful, and search engines love this. The search engines bots track user behaviours and you will be rewarded for actually helping people.
Meta Descriptions
A well put together met description is often neglected by people and it happens to be one of the most powerful parts of SEO. It’s the first section that people see when you pop up on Google and can ultimately decide whether or not they click through to your website.
Generally, the search engine giant doesn’t like duplicate content. Yes, there are times when there is a need to cite a paragraph or sentence from another site (and link back to the source), but if publishing duplicate content becomes your way of life, you might get penalized by Google.
Another thing to consider is duplicate meta descriptions. Make sure your site doesn’t have the same meta descriptions for different pages, you will eventually get penalised and it’s not very good for the users experience regardless.
If you are a WordPress user, we highly recommend that you use a plugin called YOAST. It will help you find and fix up duplicate content on your site.
Use readable and meaningful URLs only
Your URL’s must be readable to both the user and the search engines, otherwise, things can get confusing. Don’t worry too much about having a long URL, if it’s easy to understand for both the search engines and the users, you are in the clear.
This is what our URL looks likes for one of our blogs
https://hk.dgreatsolutions.com/blog/how-to-use-instagram-to-build-brand-trust/
Yes its quite long, but I bet you know exactly what that blog post is going to be about right? And so does the search engine bot.
Stay away from page URLs like this:
https://www.website.com/blog/news/blog20343
This isn’t memorable. You must try to keep your URL memorable for the use in case they want to go back to it quickly, instead of searching through dozens of pages to find it again.
Even though search engine bots have come a long way, they still need to be guided. If your URL’s are all over the place and don’t explain what the specific page is, the bots will get confused as well.
Create & publish unique content consistently to improve your rankings
If you have ever written content for your company you will know how hard it can be some days to think of something new and to not just copy someones else’s blog or article. It’s ok to take inspiration from someone else’s work, but you have to write it in your own way. This not only helps with your ranking, but will help with branding too. If you are in this for the long hall, then you want to have a unique voice, people will begin to read your content purely because YOU wrote it.
Fresh content is a must for any online business – if your wanting success that is. Google and other search engines love to see new and useful content being posted and shared regularly. It shows them that you are credible and that you’re the place to go for people in that industry.
Conclusion
To sum everything up that was covered in this blog, focus on the user first and search engines second. Of course, you need to make sure the parameters are in place to ensure that the search engines can register what you are doing but don’t write your content with the robots first in mind. Real-life humans are the ones that are reading your stuff, so you need to make sure that it appeals to them first. Like we said, search engines follow users. So if your content is good and people are reading and sharing it. The search engines will pick that up and boost your ranking accordingly.
Just by following these few simple tips, you will see a massive gain in your SEO efforts and also in your content writing ability. Which in the long run, will bring in more traffic, more leads and, more customers.
