Blog
/
No items found.

10 Steps to Improve Your Website's SEO

Although SEO is a constantly evolving discipline, there are some easy tactics HapPhi has used that you can too which will enhance your website's rankings. The most critical thing you can do is consistently produce high-quality content and ensure your technological settings are up-to-date.

Written by
June 15, 2022

Photo by ArtsyBee on Pixabay

Search engine algorithms are getting smarter every day, and it shows in how they answer queries. As Google and other search engines have become more advanced, they’ve become more efficient at finding the best results for a given query.  In other words, it takes more than just having a good website and a content strategy to stand out in search results. Content creation, site structure, social media optimization, and technical design are just a few of the things you can work on to improve your website’s search engine optimization.  Improving your website’s search engine optimization doesn’t mean you need to hire an SEO expert. It means you need to implement practical strategies that are scalable for your business. Here are the top 10 steps you can take to improve your website’s search engine optimization.

Step 1: Build a Content Strategy

The first step to improving your website’s search engine optimization is to build a content strategy. You can’t assume that the right keywords will magically show up when someone types a certain query into Google. You need to put in the time and effort to learn how to write for the search engines. To get started, try putting on your researcher hat. Search online to identify popular keywords related to your products or services. This will let you know what topics are trending right now, and what people are most interested in learning about. Once you’ve identified some keywords, you can use tools like the Keyword Planner and Google’s Webmastertools to identify further keyword ideas. Next, it helps to create a buyer personas in order to better understand your customers. Visit your website to learn more about who you’re selling to.  For example, if you sell athletic equipment, you can research different personas that might be interested in purchasing your products. Once you’ve identified who you’re targeting, it’s time to think about how you’re going to reach them. In order to figure out your content strategy, try keeping these three questions in mind:  - What are your visitors looking for right now? - What topics do your visitors tend to search for? - What are the most important keywords for your content?

Step 2: Update Your Technical Settings

Search engine optimization isn’t just about creating great content and getting it into the right places. It’s also about technical optimization. Websites that are designed with accessibility in mind get noticed by search engines. According to the Search Engine Land blog, 53% of Google’s ranking factors are related to quality of the page content like how readable the text is and how well links are encoded.  This means that the more difficult it is for a computer to interpret the code on your page, the less likely it is that your page will appear at the top of the search engine results. Fortunately, there are a few easy steps you can take to improve your technical setup. The easiest way to do this is to get an SEO audit completed and make the recommended updates recommended by your SEO consultant.

Step 3: Build Strong, Consistent Content

Once you’ve updated your technical settings, it’s time to create stronger, more consistent content. This will help you overcome common SEO problems like duplicate content and poorly structured content  Duplicate content occurs when you publish the same piece of content to multiple locations on the web. You should avoid this at all costs because it can negatively affect your SEO.  While most people think duplicate content is a problem with Google’s algorithm, it can actually have a significant impact on Bing’s algorithm as well.  This is because Google and Bing use different strategies to determine which websites should appear at the top of the SERPs. Therefore, if one algorithm is considering your content as spam, the other algorithm could interpret it as a different piece of content that isn’t spam.

Step 4: Double-Check Your URLs

Another important SEO technique is URL-level optimization. Your URL is your page’s address; it’s the path from your site to the rest of the internet. There are a number of factors that go into a page’s URL, including the existence of keyword-rich terms and phrases.  In addition to including keywords in the URL, you should also make sure that the URL is easy to remember and spell correctly. This will help people find your content when they’re searching for relevant terms.  To double-check the URLs on your website, log into your server and run a crawl script. This will capture all the URLs on your site, which you can then examine to make sure they’re correct. You can also use tools like Screaming Frog or the All in One SEO Tool to perform URL audits.

Step 5: Organize Your Site’s Content

The more consistent your content is, the less work it is for the search engines. As a result, you’re likely to see a significant boost in your site’s ranking.  In addition to ensuring your content is strong and consistent, you should also make sure it’s organized. Search engine algorithms are designed to understand the hierarchy of topics on your website.  When it comes to organizing your content, there are two main approaches you can take: a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach.  A top-down approach begins with the highest level topics and works its way down to the lowest-level topics. On the other end, a bottom-up approach works the other way around, starting with the lowest topics and working its way up to the highest-level topics.

Step 6: Incorporate User-Friendly Features

Another thing you can do to improve your website’s search engine optimization is to incorporate user-friendly features. These include things like page speed, mobile-friendliness, and security.  Your site’s speed can have a significant impact on your pages’ rankings in the eyes of Google. A recent Moz article explains that Google has made significant strides in the area of page speed, but that the company wants to see even better results from page speed optimization.  The more difficult it is for a computer to interpret the code on your page, the less likely it is that your page will appear at the top of the search engine results.

Step 7: Add Google-Friendly Tags

Crawling your pages to identify any potential issues and then making the appropriate updates is an important step for improving your website’s search engine optimization. You can also use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to identify any potential issues on your pages.  Additionally, you should be adding the appropriate Google Analytics code to each page on your website. Google Analytics is an essential tool for monitoring your website’s traffic and tracking the effectiveness of your content strategy.  Adding Google Analytics, Google’s Disavow Tools, and Google’s Webmaster Tools will help you understand where your traffic is coming from, where it’s going, and how you can improve your pages’ content to get more visitors in the future.

Bottom Line

While SEO is a constantly evolving field, there are some simple strategies you can implement to improve your site’s rankings. The most important thing you can do is consistently create high-quality content and make sure your technical settings are up-to-date.

Get started with HapPhi today

Access all HapPhi features free with 5 free GB, then decide whether you love HapPhi or want to marry HapPhi.

First 1000 people on the list get 100 free tokens.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.