Having an optimized website is essential if you want to drive more traffic and increase your visibility in search engine results. Here are 16 website SEO musts that will help improve your website ranking.
1. Start with comprehensive keyword research to identify short-tail and long-tail keywords relevant to your topic and/or industry.
2. Optimize site speed by compressing assets, reducing redirects, and minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
3. Create quality content focused on helping users answer their questions or solve their problems as opposed to simply promoting your brand or services.
4. Utilize schema markup to provide search engines with additional information about the content on your page.
5. Incorporate internal linking between pages so that search engines can easily index all of the pages on your site.
6. Optimize metadata ( titles, descriptions, alt tags ) for each page so that it accurately reflects the contents of the page.
7. Structure content with headings and subheadings in a way that makes it easier for both users and search engine crawlers to scan the page.
8. Include share buttons so readers can easily share your content on social media platforms.
9. Make use of external links to reliable source s in order to build authority for the topics discussed on each page .
10. Consider using rich snippets such as reviews , events , recipes , products , and videos in order to draw more attention to specific pages within search results.
11. Keep URLs short and descriptive using relevant keywords whenever possible (Avoid using numbers or random characters)
12. Monitor mobile usability since Google has begun taking mobile-friendly sites into account when ranking websites.
13. Take advantage of social media profiles by creating high-quality posts that link back to related pages on your website.
14. Utilize tools such as Google Search Console ( formerly Webmaster Tools ) which provides useful insights into how your webpages perform in organic searches.
15. Create an XML sitemap so search engine bots can crawl through all of the content within your site.
16. Use UTM tracking codes on links pointing back from external sources like social media profiles or other websites so you can track data regarding clicks, impressions, etc.
