How To Improve Search
rankings By Optimizing
your Home Page
There are many things to be kept in mind while doing business online. Just setting up a website is not enough. You need to choose the right technology – whether it’s the best text messaging app for Android and IOS, the right website host, or a great live chat solution.
Many brands and businesses know (or think they know) that they need SEO for their digital properties, and the benefits they will gain from the SEO work being implemented on their behalf. But what exactly is optimization and how can you optimize your homepage to ensure a good ranking on search engines?
What is Optimization?
In relation to websites, we talk about search engine optimization (SEO), which shows how we optimize sites using relevant words and terms to increase visibility when people search for things. The higher your visibility, the higher you’re ranking – and customers will be more likely to visit your site.
How Does SEO Work?
Any search engine uses bots to visit and examine all the pages on the Internet. They collect information from those pages and then put them in a particular index. Once indexed, the algorithm analyzes that data using hundreds or thousands of factors to determine where that web page/site should appear in relation to a specific query from the user.
Improving SEO rankings is not just about keywords and phrases. There are many factors that major search engines such as Google take into account when calculating where a website should be placed.
If you are building a new website, there are many factors to ensure that your site is optimized and it can achieve the best ranking.
Content
Your website may have good phrases and words but unless your content will be of sufficient quality, you will not get far. A page must contain at least 300 words of original content (search engines may search for literary or duplicate content and will penalize you for doing so).
Do not use Long-lasting paragraphs. Ideally, you should break your content into small pieces and use headings and subtitles where appropriate. Google processes around 3.5 billion searches per day.
Key words and phrases
Effective keywords or phrases also need to be included to optimize your quality content for searches. Such words must be relevant to the subject matter in order to identify the type of words the user uses for search. Following a simple checklist for this section can be a great help.
- One main keyword and some related keywords (3 to 4 should be sufficient).
- Always include the primary keyword in the URL of the page.
- Also include that primary keyword in your Meta description, in your title tag, and in your main title.
- Create diverse content with keywords and phrases.
- Use subtitles and bullet lists where appropriate.
- Any link to other pages in your domain should have a clear and effective anchor.
- Use images, a good guide are one image per 300 words.
Backlinks
Backlinks are another useful tool to optimize your site and increase its ranking. If other websites recognize the quality of your site and link to your site, the search engines will note it and give a higher rank to your site. But how do you get those sites to drive traffic towards your site.
If you create quality and engaging content which other sites want to share, they will include these Backlinks on their site. Unique content can be a great way to encourage other sites to Backlink to you, as is the use of good info graphics, interesting statistics, or unique content.
It is also worth considering which tools you use as an E-commerce business. If you have a well-optimized website and Backlinks feeding on your site, you can also make sales through multiple channels.
Tracking your stock using the best inventory management software helps you ensure that you have what is available to sell and avoids customer disappointment – you don’t want them to Backlink from negative reviews.
Site Crawl ability
This may sound like a strange term, but crawl ability describes a search engine bots’ ability to access and crawl all the content on your site. If those small virtual bots cannot access any of your web pages to index that content, those pages will never be ranked. Make sure that your site with a good linking structure allows bots to access every webpage that links all your pages together. If there are pages that you do not want to crawl, you can use a robots.txt file to exclude them.
For Google, their search console not only lets you see which pages are crawled, it also has a robots.txt generator that you can use. Search Console also provides Google with a secondary method for searching your pages by submitting them to a Sitemap.xml file.
Security
People may ask why security is important for site optimization. Remember: Nobody wants to use a site that puts them at risk. If your site is not considered trustworthy then you can forget good Backlinks!
Make sure that you always use HTTPS encryption on your site. This will provide you with SSL certificate, which will provide a reliable and secure connection between your portal and your customers’ device or accessibility, make sure your site is well coded and has a sitemap so that bots and search engines know what your site is about.
Speed
In this part of the information age, users expect faster speeds when accessing a website. This is another important factor to optimize your website. If the loading speed of your website is low, you will not be likely to raise any search rankings high. Consider these three loading benchmarks:
- High-ranked sites will take less than three seconds
- Ecommerce sites will take 2 seconds or less
- Optimum time (as seen by Google) will take less than half a second.
Engagement Levels
While quality content is an important factor, it does not tell the whole story. Even the best content won’t be of much use if your users don’t engage with it.
Google uses Rank Brain to monitor and assess how much engagement users have with your site. Metrics such as click-through rate, time to live (the amount of time a user spends on your page) and bounce rates are taken into consideration.
A high bounce rate – where people leave your site early – will affect your overall performance and ranking. Make sure that, not only your content is good, but the overall design of the site is also of high quality and the site is easy to navigate.