Essential Website Optimization Strategies

What are the factors to concentrate on? How can one boost rankings? How can anyone build traffic in such a competitive environment?

This post will delve into which factors carry the most weight and how to optimize for each.

As Google's deep machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to evolve, each will carry more weight in the Google Core Algorithm. The goal for Google is to deliver on their mission to present helpful and reliable results for searchers with a user intent. This means advanced keyword research and selection is more important then ever. Before spending time and resources trying to rank for a phrase, we need to look at the websites that are currently at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for that phrase.

The foundation for technical SEO is having a solid website architecture.

One cannot simply publish a random collection of pages and posts. An SEO-friendly site architecture will guide users throughout your site and make it easy for Google to crawl and index your pages.

Once you have the right architecture in place, it’s time to perform a technical or SEO audit;

• Check for status code errors and correct them.

• Check the robot.txt for errors. Optimize if needed.

• Check your site indexing via Google Search Console. Examine and fix any issues discovered.

• Fix duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions.

• Audit your website content. Check the traffic stats in Google Analytics. Consider improving or pruning underperforming content.

• Fix broken links. These are an enemy of the user experience – and potentially rankings.

• Submit your XML sitemap to Google via Google Search Console.

The best User Experience (UX) practices focus on improving the quality of the user experience. Factors that influence UX include:

• Useful: Your content needs to be unique and satisfy a need.

• Usable: Your website needs to be easy to use and navigate.

• Desirable: Your design elements and brand should evoke emotion and appreciation.

• Findable: Integrate design and navigation elements to make it easy for users to find what they need.

• Accessible: Content needs to be accessible to everyone – including the 12.7% of the population with disabilities.

• Credible: Your site needs to be trustworthy for users to believe you.

• Valuable: Your site needs to provide value to the user in terms of experience and to the company in terms of positive ROI.

from Google Search Central:

"Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page's content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user's query. Since the majority of users now access Google Search with a mobile device, Google primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent going forward."

Here are some basics for making your website mobile-friendly:

• Make your site adaptive to any device – be it desktop, mobile, or tablet.

• Always scale your images when using a responsive design, especially for mobile users.

• Use short meta titles. They are easier to read on mobile devices.

• Avoid pop-ups that cover your content and prevent visitors from getting a glimpse of what your content is all about.

• Less can be more on mobile. In a mobile-first world, long-form content doesn’t necessarily equate to more traffic and better rankings.

In 2021, the Page Experience Update rolled out and is now incorporated into Google’s core algorithm, as a ranking factor.

Google: “loading experience, interactivity, and visual stability of page content, and combined are the foundation of Core Web Vitals.”

Tools To Measure Core Web Vitals:

• PageSpeed Insights: Measures both mobile and desktop performance and provides recommendations for improvement.

• Lighthouse: An open-source, automated tool developed by Google to help developers improve web page quality. It has several features not available in PageSpeed Insights, including some SEO checks.

• Search Console: A Core Web Vitals report is now included in GSC, showing URL performance as grouped by status, metric type, and URL group.

Schema markup, when added to a webpage, creates a rich snippet – an enhanced description that appears in the search results.

All leading search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex, support the use of this microdata. The value of schema is that it can provide context to a webpage for the search engine and improve the search experience of the user.

There is no evidence that adding schema has any influence on SERPs. Popular uses for schema;

• Article.

• Book.

• Breadcrumb.

• Event.

• FAQ Page.

• How-to.

• Job Posting.

• Local Business.

• Logos.

• Medical Condition.

• Movie.

• Organization.

• Person.

• Product.

• Recipe.

• Review.