SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an important online marketing medium. It improves brand awareness, increases credibility, and helps you drive free traffic and more customers to your business.
Business owners, however, often fail at search engine optimization. It is not because SEO doesn’t work, but it is often because they fail to get the basics right.
If you are also struggling to rank your website higher in the search engines, this is the perfect post for you. There are many more advanced SEO topics that we have covered in the past, but the purpose of this post is to instantly get your website up in the search engine rankings.
Follow these 7 steps and you will see an instant boost in the SERPs.
1. Fix Crawl Errors
When was the last time you checked your website for any crawl errors and fixed them?
I guess it’s a long time, because this is something that most of us forget to do or take for granted. However, if your website has crawl errors, they are likely to hurt your website’s search engine rankings.
What exactly are crawl errors?
In case you’re wondering, these are errors that Google finds in your website when it is trying to crawl specific desktop or phone pages on your site.
404 errors, DNS errors, and server errors are some of the most common crawl errors that Google encounters on most websites. The good news is that you can easily fix these errors via Google Search Console.
2. Image Optimization
The next step would be to optimize the images you have on your website.
What do we mean by optimization?
Simply speaking, the images you use on your website should be web-friendly. In other words, images on your website should have the smallest possible size — of course, without sacrificing the quality.
It is especially true for an image-heavy website.
Web-friendly images make your website load faster, which is now an important search engine ranking factor.
You can check the loading speed of your website with SEO Site Checkup’s free analysis tool to check the loading speed of your website.
We recommend using EWWW image optimizer for optimizing existing images in your WordPress website.
3. Image Alt Text
Adding alt text to images is a very easy job, but it can significantly improve the chances of your website getting ranked in search engines for the right keywords.
The concept behind adding alt text is that search engines can’t read images. They can only read and understand texts. So whenever you add an image, it is very important that you include ‘alt text’ for each image to help search engines understand what an image is about.
Moreover, this alt text is also used by human users who can’t see an image for some reason (slow internet connection or a broken image link).
SEO experts see alt text as an opportunity to insert the right keywords in your website. Moreover, with the right keywords, images, and alt text inclusion, you may also get a good amount of traffic via Google Image Search.
4. Fix Meta Tags
Are you using proper meta tags: title tags and meta description for each webpage or blog post that you publish on your site?
It is as important for SEO as it gets.
The good news is that fixing meta tags isn’t that big of an issue. You just need to identify which web pages are missing title tags and meta descriptions, so you can fix them.
You can use SEO Site Checkup’s Meta Tags Analyzer tool (free) to identify web pages with missing meta tags. Alternatively, you can also download and use Screaming Frog to identify such web pages.
5. Get a Sitemap
A sitemap increases the search visibility of your website. When Google search crawlers come to your website, a sitemap helps them navigate through different parts of your site, which eventually makes it easier for Google crawlers to index and rank the different pages of your site.
Most websites would already have a sitemap. However, if you don’t have one, you are missing out on a serious opportunity. Use our free tool to check if you have a sitemap.
If you already have a sitemap, make sure that it is updated and represents the best structure of your site to search crawlers.
6. Fix Broken Links
An active website creates dozens of internal as well as external links every month. Most webmasters create those links and forget about them. In reality, however, it doesn’t work that way.
You need to be careful that your website does not have a lot of broken links. Otherwise, the credibility of your website will diminish in the eyes of search engines.
In this step, you should check for any broken links that your website may have. Identify those broken links and fix them. You are very likely to get a boost in search engine rankings after fixing all broken links on your website.
7. Optimize Your Landing Pages
When we create landing pages, we are always focused on user intent, relevance, and just a good overall user-experience.
Those are essential elements for a landing page, and you must not compromise on that.
However, it does not mean that you cannot increase the SEO potential of your website by including a few good keywords and strategically placing them.
Here are a few steps you can take to make sure your site’s landing pages are well optimized for SEO:
Identify a good long-tail keyword to build your landing page around.
Use that long-tail keyword to create the copy of your landing page.
Long-form landing page copy gives you more opportunity to rank for keywords. However, make sure that it doesn’t get boring for your readers.
Make sure that the copy of your landing page is strong, relevant, and engaging. You need users to spend a good amount of time on the landing pages, so it sends a positive signal to search engines.
Make the design interesting and very engaging, so nobody quits your landing page because of a bad design or user experience.
Include relevant LSI keywords in the copy to give your landing page a better chance of ranking for more keywords.
Conclusion
While SEO is a long-term process and requires persistent efforts and hard work, it doesn’t have to be difficult all the time.
Follow these 7 steps and fix the issues you may have on your website to get an instant boost in search engine rankings. If you have any questions, you can always contact us.
