Help your SEO strategy by adopting these guidelines.

In todays modern world, every business needs to stand out from the crowd. With google search being the main choice these days, how can you achieve this? I have compiled what I think are the top most important things you can adopt to help your website rank higher in google search.

1. Clean Simple Design

Clean and Simple Web Design is what people want these days.  People aren’t that impressed with flashy bloated web templates.  They just want to go to your site, find the information they want and leave and to be done in a timely manner.  Distractions of animations loading, poor user interaction and navigation is really just a nuisance, rather than something nice to look at. Your web design need to adopt the following principles to engage your audience from the get go.

  • Purpose
  • Communication
  • Typefaces
  • Colours
  • Images
  • Navigation
  • Grid Based Layouts

2. Content is King

The media on your web page sets the tone for your business. People visiting your website may be interested in services you offer. So coming across as honest and trustworthy is key.

  • Needs to have high quality readable content. Good grammar and spelling, don’t copy texts from other sites, the text needs to be original.
  • Use power words like you, free, now or today, new, because.
  • Be funny, controversial, emotion provoking, useful/interesting and popular.
  • Hire a professional content writer to help if needs be.
  • Back links from good quality websites.
  • Text is great but people really want video. Adding video and embedding them into your web pages is the most effective thing you can do. It can make you rank high in a short amount of time.

3. Performance

Speed is key, your website needs to display pages as quickly as possible. So consider server location and how many other websites are on the same box.  Below shows you how you can check these two vital pieces of information.

  • Keep plugins to a minimum.  More plugins means more risk of things going wrong on updates.
  • Make sure theme is lightweight. 
  • Make sure your body text is black text on white background.
  • Use Pingdom on your site to find out how many request files it uses.  If its over 50 then its a bit on the high side.
  • Speed – Check that your Search console Crawl Stats Time spent downloading Average in milliseconds is less than 500ms.
  • Server Location – The nearer your website is to your users the quicker the web page returns (whois.domaintools) Check your server location is near your target audience.  Enter your web address and on the info page lookup “IP Location”.  Your server should be in the same country as your target audience.
  • How Many Other websites are on the same box – Lookup “IP Address” and then after it will say in brackets how many other websites are on the same box.  If your website has lots of other websites then this can slow your website significantly (whois.domaintools) Check you have no more than 100 other websites on your server.

For some popular and competitive search key phrases you need patience as it can take 2 years at least to appear on page 1 on google searches.

Categories: SEO, WordPress