Let’s face it, improving your Site’s SEO is very important when it comes to growing your business. Whether you’re an independent contractor or a pre-established business, optimized SEO can be the difference between using your service, or the competition’s. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of 10 of the most important SEO tips we could find! If you’re a WordPress user, don’t forget to check out my new post 7 Must Have WordPress Plugins.
- Keep your URLs Consistent: Did you know that there is a big difference between http://timereaction.com, http://www.timereaction.com, and http://timereaction.com/index.php? When indexing and ranking your website, all of these URLs will be considered to be different, when in reality they all link to the same content.
- Keep your URLs Short: When writing this article, WordPress automatically suggests that I create this blog post as http://www.timereaction.com/10-quick-seo-tips-to-boost-your-sites-ranking/ — While it’s good to include as much relevant information pertaining to your blog post’s title in the URL, you want to make sure you don’t go overboard.
- Include Links To Your Internal Content: When writing a blog post, it’s always useful to link to other pages within your website. This is because internal links allow for easier indexing of those pages, while informing PageRank services that this content may be “fresh”, like Social – The Evolution of Business.
- Speed Up Your Load Time: Who really wants to wait around for your pages to load? As you may be able to tell, page load time is an issue that even Timereaction faces today. Luckily for you, there are a few ways to improve this. You can use a CDN to host your files and improve their load speed, or you can even install WordPress plugins that will cache your data to improve performance. My personal preference is W3 Total Cache.
- Maintain an Online Presence: Make sure you’re leveraging the power of Social Media websites. Just as including links to internal content is necessary, it’s just as necessary (if not more) to have external websites linking to your content. This helps notify PageRank services that other websites enjoy your content, which makes them more likely to rank your content higher.
- Create a Mobile-Optimized Site: You’ll want to ensure that even if your website looks nice on a web browser, it will look just as nice, and retain all functionality if being browsed from a mobile phone. Visits to your website from mobile phones are only going to get more frequent, so having a simplified version of your website is an absolute must.
- Set Up Google Webmaster Tools: Google Webmaster Tools is a great toolset provided to you by our friends over at Google. It’s great to help give you insight into how your website is being browsed. It will inform you of if it’s been crawling your site (finding links, content) and which pages it has been discovering, which leads us on to our next tip.
- Create your XML Sitemap: One of the most important things you can do to improve your website’s visibility is to include an XML Sitemap. This Sitemap will include a link to every piece of content on your website, whether it’s a web page or a blog post. By submitting this Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, it allows them to retrieve information about each and every page on your website, indexing all of your content! How cool is that? If you’re using WordPress you can install the Google Sitemap Generator plugin which will automatically generate your Sitemap for you!
- Include Social Sharing Buttons: Before we spoke about maintaining an online presence and having other websites linking to your content, and this is where Social Sharing can come into play. The more people you can get to share your posts, the more PageRank services will think your post is relevant, and therefore will improve its ranking. If you’re using WordPress, you can install the Share Buttons by AddToAny which will add all major social media buttons to the bottom of your posts.
You’re well on your way to driving a ton of traffic to your website, but we also have to understand that it’s an uphill battle. Traffic doesn’t come overnight (unless you can create a viral post). It’s a slow and steady race. The best thing you can do is keep pumping out awesome and original content, and soon enough all of the pieces should come together. Good luck!