In the 21st century, having a website is more than important if one wants to keep up with the highly competitive digital world. However, having a website is not enough when it comes to fighting for higher recognition and bigger conversions.
Websites exist in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others. Even if some of them are more popular, more sophisticated just like Google and others are relatively localized, it is not easy to rank high in any of them.
Google is the most widespread search engine and the branch of digital marketing which specializes in ranking websites on Google is called search engine optimization.
When the question “How to optimize a website” pops up, search engine optimization also known as SEO comes into the arena.
On top of that, now that mobiles have evolved to be an inseparable part of everyone’s life search engine optimization is also relevant for mobile. When we think of ranking higher we should also optimize the website for mobile. Some websites have apps that are being downloaded from the app store or the google play store. The optimization of the apps is called App Store Optimization also known as ASO.
Your user flows and the way how to convert them into buyers also should be optimized. If you’re not optimizing conversion from visitors into buyers, there’s a limit in scaling your traffic. Here you can find out how to plan your conversion optimization activities to implement it efficiently.
Overall, here are the best ways to optimize your website in 2024.
Study your website technically
This means analyzing your website’s overall health and determining the problems.
How does the user feel navigating through your website?
Does he/she reach the conversion or does the traffic drop drastically from the specific page?
Are there any 404 Error pages on your website, how much does it take for your website to open and function fully?
Once the problems are detected, it is high time to give them quick solutions.
You can check your website’s technical health with such SEO tools as Moz, Screaming Frog.
Moz, Ahref, Semrush show the domain authority of your website, the overall traffic, and the traffic of each page of your website, the speed of your website. Knowing when a certain page was doing fine and when exactly it dropped will help you during the optimization procedures, that is you will know what pages bring the most traffic, whether to optimize the website speed or not. One of the most important aspects of website optimization is the WordPress theme that you use. It needs to be light and to load quickly, to achieve this, the theme needs to be created in accordance to a few simple rules. Additionally, it needs to come with a support for various plugins that would allow for image compression that will significantly reduce the amount of data website needs to send to be fully loaded. On the other hand, tools like Screaming Frog crawls the website and give an in-deep analysis of whether there non-functioning pages. If error pages are found, it is advisable to redirect them to healthy pages or to completely delete them.
However, you do not simply delete pages from your website. If the specific page has a high domain ranking, has valuable backlinks, you should try to restore it by finding its core issues.
Backlinks are all the external links a specific page has. If a foreign website links to one of your pages it means it gives you a backlink. Backlinks make up the most essential part of search engine optimization. If websites with equal or higher domain ratings give your website a link, your website gets even more verified and trusted by Google, therefore your ratings boost accordingly. The same is true for websites with bad rankings or reputations.
Getting links from PBNs (private blog networks) which are owned by an individual and are most likely selling links can result in not only a drop in the domain rating but also you can get penalized from Google to such an extent as being removed from Google completely.
Do Keyword research
The second essential part of search engine optimization is on-site SEO. Optimizing your website internally with no supporting backlinks.
Whether we are SEO specialists or not, all of us know how Google works. You type whatever you need to find, and voila Google comes up with the best matching results. But how does Google do that? Well, based on the website. Google sees that thousand of consumers mean a specific thing with a specific keyword (the word used for search) and start attaching that keyword to a specific service or product. Any time that keyword is typed, a certain product comes up. That’s why it is essential to do keyword research and find the best matching keyword for your website so that it comes up at least on the first page of search results. But how to do keyword research? Well, lucky enough some of the tools mentioned above such as Ahrefs o Semrush provide enormous data of keywords monthly, weekly, and even daily analysis. As your audience evolves consistently, their search tendencies and intents change simultaneously. If with a specific keyword your audience was searching for a blog to read and educate themselves at a given time period, it does not mean that it is going to be like that forever. The blog keyword can easily turn to a landing page conversion keyword and vise versa.
Keyword research includes analyzing competitors, seeing what specific keywords they use for specific intents, and if it is justified, that is if the page optimized with a specific keyword ranks well and brings a good amount of traffic, it is worthy to use that keyword.
Where should your include your primary keyword? Well, if you have ever heard about meta tag optimization, that is exactly what you should do.
Meta tag optimization is including your main keyword in meta title, meta description, meta keywords, and even in headers. It is advisable to optimize the whole content based on that keyword as well but making sure that you have avoided keyword stuffing.
To sum up, optimizing your website for search engines may seem complicated or challenging now that there are many alternatives to any service or product that ever gets created, however, it is not something to get scared of. Google always mentions how much it loves and appreciates valuable content and information. Just be natural with your keywords, bring value to your audience, and you will surely achieve the recognition you deserve. Even if you are scared to do it alone, there is always a solution. Click here to find freelancers who are experienced and skilled to quickly do it for you.
