Your website can be a real gem and maybe the most beautiful one in the world, but if you don’t focus on SEO, things will still be under the sod.
SEO is a set of specific actions performed to improve your site performance with a motive to rank it higher on search engine rankings.
It is the process of improving the volume or quantity of the traffic of your website through organic searches in search engines like Google.
The higher the position in search result pages, the higher is the number of organic visits to your site. Generally, users never try to visit lower search results in search engines.
Therefore, a good SEO ranking is mandatory for your website’s success.
It’s always better to understand the correlation between search engine position and website metrics.
Being within the few top positions in the search results can make a huge difference to your online business.
SEO may target different kinds of search, including image, local, and video search, and so on.
Furthermore, with strategic SEO you can create content that is Google-friendly, and this way you can rank yourself high on SERP and build more authority over your property.
As Google search algorithm varies with time it is tricky to maintain a good SEO score for your website.
Here are a few of the important signs and warnings that might indicate the level of SEO friendliness of your website. This will help you become aware of and take action accordingly.
Let’s get into each of them in detail.
Responsive Layout
This era is ruled by a range of smartphones with varying dimensions. There is not a fixed resolution where your website will be presented.
Thus under such varying circumstances, your website must be highly responsive.
If you open a non-mobile-friendly website on your phone and over time every piece of content looks absurd. In this case, no one wants to stay on such a page and the visitor might never visit you back. Sounds scary, doesn’t it?
But that shouldn’t be much of a problem if you use WordPress.
WordPress directory boasts lots of free responsive themes. Thus with the help of these responsive themes, you can convert your website into candy not only through phones but also tablets and laptops.
You can create any kind of website; portfolio, magazine, blog, or business website, without worrying about the responsive feature of your website.
Is your web page mobile-friendly? You can always check this online with some free tools.
Search engines focus mainly on responsive-based rankings.
Google favors responsive designs, also responsiveness avoids duplicate content and visitors get an awesome place to visit thus responsiveness ultimately raises your site performance over search engines.
Loading Time
It’s annoying when you witness a white screen with a small thrower in between, indicating that you need to wait a little longer while loading a website.
Statistics claim that most people leave the website if it loads in more than 3 seconds.
That means a lot of traffic you are losing with just an extra second of loading time.
There are various reasons behind the increased loading time. Non-optimized images, uncompressed and non-minimized codes, number and size of images, bulky contents, large JS files are some of the main reasons behind bigger loading time.
- Some of the tools like GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom help you analyse the speed of your website and also highlights the error with recommended solutions.
Page speed is one of the main signals used by the search engine to determine the user experience of a website and that affects the search ranking. Maybe not a direct ranking factor but indirectly it plays a huge role in affecting your ranking in search results.
Pages with a long load time lead to higher bounce rates and lower average time on page.
Low load time is among the best SEO practice. It is always important to optimize the loading time of your website to improve your site performance over the search engine.
URL Structure
URL is the mirror of your website. It should contain all important relevant information about its contents so the readers can understand the details properly.
Search engines first read the link and will read the titles of pages deciding whether it is worth further investigation.
URL must be easy to read so that users and search engines should be able to know about the page is all about just by looking at the URL.
Also, Keywords matter, and your target queries should be within URLs.
SEO makes this task easy for all your visitors as important keywords are shown in the URL. And also, the link name coincides with the title of the page.
Thus URLs have an impact on a page’s ability to rank. You always need to optimize the URL keyword so that you can improve your website performance over search engines.
SEO Tips for URL Optimization
- Make the URL human-readable
- Use hyphen-in-the-URL
- Put your best content on the root folder. For eg, https://marketing-optimist.com/yourbestcontent
- Avoid capital letter in the URL
- Use robots.txt to block bad URL from search spiders
- Use the canonical version of URL
- Remember to use 301 redirects when you change your URL
- Use keyword in the URL
Meta Description
Meta descriptions are the previews of your posts; they are shown on search engine results pages.
The meta description gives users general clues about the content of your website.
Meta description always plays an important role in making the user click on your link and visit your page.
The more people continue their searches on your site; the more popular you are in search engine rankings.
Optimizing the Meta description is crucial for SEO and is considered one of the best SEO practices.
Although they do not directly affect SEO scores, they certainly contribute via click-through rates, which ultimately are linked to SEO and rankings.
Hence, if your website is not performing well in search engines then Meta description might be one of the reasons behind that.
Always consider optimizing meta descriptions as a crucial part of your optimization process.
Keyword Stuffing
A keyword is a word or a phrase that is used by a user to search or retrieve something in search engines.
Keywords ensure that your content is displayed to the right people at the right time.
Thus a large amount of traffic is attracted to your website simply by being able to use the right keywords with the right intensity.
Therefore, keyword optimization is important to increase search engine ranking.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is another bad influencer that you don’t want when Google comes around.
Duplicate content confuses Google and other search engines to select which of the identical pages to rank in the search results.
Thus the original page may not be the one chosen for the top search results. The reason that your SEO rankings are badly affected is that when they try to evaluate such pieces of content, search engines get confused.
Search engines cannot compare which content is more relevant and which should be taken up in the result list. Hence, it is obvious that duplicate content harms your ranking.
It is always recommended to check your pages for plagiarism and then post to avoid content duplication.
Title Tag
The title tag displays the title of your webpage. During your search process in the search engine, you can see clickable headlines in blue color, Such phrases or texts that represent the theme or overall content are referred to as “title tag”.
They are the clickable blue headlines of your post that are displayed on the results pages during your search process.
They provide search engines with general information about the specialty of your web content. The title tag should be relatively a short phrase, usually within a limit of 65 characters, and should perfectly represent the main theme of the content.
It is always a good idea to insert your primary keyword in the title tag.
Statistics reveal a nearly 35% increase in search engine performance can be done from the title of your webpage.
This is another warning sign that your WordPress website is not SEO-friendly. So include it in your SEO strategy.
Wrapping Up
So with this, we conclude our writing and by now you should have been aware of many signs that could tell you how SEO friendly is your website.
Though we went thoroughly through a few of them here in this post, many other similar factors and signals would help you turn your website into a perfectly optimized site.
We recommend you create a list of all the SEO signals and imply them in a way to rank your website better in search engines.
Brian Dean from Backlinko brings together the Google ranking factors and talks about their relevancy, controversies, and speculations here in this article.
