While creating quality content is the most important part of your website, it is not enough. All your efforts would be wasted if that content didn’t get to the audience you intended. You will need to optimize your site for a friendlier user experience and more traffic.

Why You Need to Optimize Your Website

The main goal of site optimization is to not only make it easy for web crawlers to find your page but also for it to rank at the top for relevance. You want web users to be able to find you easily when they search for information linked to your page, which essentially means you should be on the first page of any search engine.

Optimization is not a one-time process as search engines keep changing their algorithms. If the content on your site is still relevant, you may want to keep it and only fix keywords to meet the required standards as per Google — and other search engines.

SEO has changed a lot since Google introduced Rank Brain in 2015. The algorithm depends a lot on artificial intelligence and so it has removed some of the issues that caused content creators valuable ranking. While the algorithm still places backlinks highly, it has taken into consideration other aspects that were neglected previously as we discuss below.

Before you increase traffic to your site, ensure that a cheap host or slow loading speed are not sabotaging your efforts.

Accurate Page Titles

Keyword-based articles are going to do a whole lot of good for your online visibility. You also want to integrate keywords strategically into your article titles, ad website source code, etc. Meta descriptions have been important in the past and they still are in 2018.

As you create your content, you want to throw in phrases that are related to your keyword but in a natural way. Search engines look deeper into the text and will rate the site or page favorably if they find the phrases to be related. Also worth noting is the fact that longer pieces do better than shorter ones.

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Keyword Analysis and Continuous Development

When creating content, you are advised to work on ever-green information. Having this in mind, note that keywords change regularly and so you should regularly analyze it to measure its value to your site. The analysis will help you look at your competition and how the keywords they use rank.

Doing a keyword analysis also helps you rate your website traffic — baseline — against your conversion rate. With this information, you will know which keyword to develop so you can come up with proper ways to go about it.

Doing a Business Analysis

Ask yourself this, “If I were to search my site online, what would I type?” Ask a customer the same question to see how keyword matches what your site is about. Now, with this information, search and see whether your site makes it to the first page given this information.

Doing a business analysis requires you to check initial keyword nomination so that your preferred keywords are the same as your audience would use when doing their searches. A website analysis is also part of this process where you rank your site against that of the competition to see where you stand.

Make Navigation Easy

Visitors like it when they can navigate a site easily. Provide a sitemap that will make it easy for them to move from one webpage to the next with ease. It is advisable to create a 404 page too for errors so that any mistypes and other minor mistakes will take your visitor to this page. This will help you know what they were searching that they could not find on your site.

Once you have created a sitemap, submit it to any of the search engines to make navigation easy for any visitor regardless of the search engine they use.

Optimized Content

Everything boils down to powerful content. You want to optimize your content by using Meta descriptions, using shorter sentences, adding key-words related phrases to increase the significance of content without misusing the keyword, image optimization and compression and creating internal links.

To make your content even more valuable and reliable, link to authoritative sites. The traffic you send to that authority site will somehow come back to your site.

Conclusion

While optimizing your site, do not forget mobile platforms. They are becoming increasingly important to web users, thanks to over half the world owning a smartphone. Mobile optimization is different in a few ways, being as images are supposed to be smaller and content designed to fit in smaller screens.

As we noted, optimizing is not a one-time affair, but one requiring a regular check to stay in line with new regulation. Use online tools such as Google Analytics to measure your traffic and progress.

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Over to you

Share your thoughts about optimizing your website in the comment section below. I’m really looking forward to reading your comments ;).