Quick SEO Tips for Every Website

Having your own business is hard work. Designing your website is more hard work and maintaining it is a forever ongoing project. With your to-do list growing longer with every minute, it can be difficult to even fathom SEO, not to mention the willpower to start it. Luckily for you, it can be fairly easy to get going and put into place some quick fixes that will help optimize your site and start you on the road to ranking higher in search engines. 

Create XML Sitemap and Add Your Site to Webmaster Tools

Your sitemap is required to tell search engines what pages are on your website. Submitting your sitemap to search engines will allow them to crawl your site better. After you create your sitemap, submit it to Google Webmaster Tools so that Google can crawl your site and index your website. If you don’t have Google Webmaster Tools, it’s easy to set up. You simply need a Google account and then can sign up for the Tools. 

Are you Sure Your Site is Being Crawled? 

If Google can’t crawl your site, it won’t be able to access your content, and as a result, you won’t rank in search engines. In order to avoid this unfortunate event, make sure you have crawlers working their way through your site. 

  • Click the site you want Google to crawl on the Webmaster Tools homepage
  • Click “Fetch as Google” in the Crawl section
  • Enter the path to the page in the text box
  • Select “web” from the dropdown list
  • Click on “fetch”. When you see the status has reached “successful”, you can click on “submit to index.”

If you want to submit individual URLs to Google’s index, you can do that as well. Simply select the URL and click “submit.” You can submit up to 500 URLs per week. 

Check on the Index Status of Your Site

Go to Google and type site:your domain.com. The results will show you how many pages are actually indexed for your site. If Google shows fewer pages than what you actually have, your site is not being indexed correctly and you will want to find out why. For more information, you can read about indexing your website on our blog. You might also find that more pages are showing up than you actually have. This is a problem as well since Google  thinks you have duplicate content and that is something you will want to correct right away.

Check Your Site for Duplicate Content

Google will penalize for duplicate content, so make sure you don’t have any both onsite and offsite. 

Your Site Should be Optimized for Mobile

It seems that just about everyone has a smartphone these days and use their mobile devices to conduct internet searches. Your website cannot simply be optimized for the computer alone, it has to be mobile friendly as well. And with mobile, it’s important that load time is fast and efficient or your customers will go somewhere else. 

How is the Page Load Time of Your Site?

It’s important to check how fast or how slow your website is loading. Google has a PageSpeed tool that you can use to analyze your site and let you know where any problems are. You do not want slow loading pages because more than likely, people will click off your site and your bounce rate will increase. Most people want things yesterday, so check your page speeds in order to ensure they are functioning at optimal speed. 

Fix Those Broken Links

Reclaim your links! Find those links that are broken on your website or other websites which point toward you site. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to help you find the missing links on your site. You want to be on the lookout for pages or websites that mention your brand name, but don’t link back to you. If you think the link is worth having, you can contact them and ask to link back to you. 

Add a Call to Action

A call to action is important for any business. If you don’t have one, your customers aren’t going to do what you want them to. An effective call to action can convince your visitors to take the desired action. This will help to cut down on your bounce rate and increase conversions. 

Use Relevant Keywords

Make sure you are targeting the right keywords that searchers are using to find you. Do a little research yourself and analyze what terms people use to find your website. Highlight those phrases in your content to ensure that you are ranking well in search engines. Use the keywords in your headers and title tags, but remember to not overuse them.