Fast Technical SEO Fixes to Increase Your Business Website’s Traffic – If you own and operate a small business, you’ve probably heard other business owners in your circle talk about the value SEO has brought in driving organic traffic to their websites. While this is true for many, SEO that’s done incorrectly can bring more harm than good to your website.
There are some tactics and practices that you might learn about on websites that are either frowned upon or out of date, which can lead to your website being “penalized” by search engines as it drops significantly in search rankings. However, there are a few minor things that you can do to help with optimization for your website without having a tremendous amount of web design and SEO knowledge.
Move to WordPress
Fast Technical SEO Fixes to Increase Your Business Website’s Traffic – As far as web hosting platforms go, WordPress is a great place for everyone from the beginner to the most advanced coders. Building a basic WordPress website is an excellent way to get started as it doesn’t require much more than dragging and dropping the elements that you want for every page on your site. If you want a more intricate site, you can either DIY your site or hire out an expert with advanced coding as there are millions of plug-ins that make it easy to customize your site.
One of the major benefits of hosting your website with WordPress is the Yoast SEO plug-in. With Yoast, you can run real-time audits on pages as you build them out so you can write SEO-driven content that effectively targets your search phrases. The free version of Yoast is often enough for most businesses to get started with SEO, but the premium version offers an extra boost that makes it easier to get into the nitty-gritty of your website.
Focus on Mobile
Fast Technical SEO Fixes to Increase Your Business Website’s Traffic – Starting on July 1, 2019, Google officially instituted mobile-first indexing. What does this mean for you and your website? It means that on July 1, 2019, the mobile version of your website was more important than the desktop version because that’s what Google indexing bots look at first. This can sometimes be difficult for some web developers to address because the vast majority of development is done on a desktop computer, which means the desktop version is the default version that’s edited. With mobile-first indexing, the content and design that’s found on the mobile version of your website are what is presented to most users who look for your site. Therefore, you need to make sure your content, images, and build-out are easy to view and navigate on a smartphone or tablet.
Fix Broken Links
Fast Technical SEO Fixes to Increase Your Business Website’s Traffic – Building links throughout your website and out to other sites across the internet are great ways to grow your digital footprint. Linking within your website is a great way to ensure that you’re growing your internal web of links. Although, it’s not uncommon for URLs to be changed or pages to get deleted as you grow and evolve your website. The same is true for outbound links. Regularly audit your site to verify that the active links you have are still good and haven’t broken as pages are deleted here and there.
Buy a Descriptive Domain
Fast Technical SEO Fixes to Increase Your Business Website’s Traffic – The domain name you register for your website plays a significant role in how you’re found online. Descriptive URLs fall into two of the top 100 factors used to determine search results in Google’s algorithm. So, while it doesn’t necessarily need to be your top priority in SEO, it should still play a part in what you do.
If you already have a website domain that you’ve established for years, it’s best to stick with that. However, you can buy up other domains that redirect to your website. For instance, a production agency that specializes in design and video called Gantry uses multiple descriptive domains like gantrycreative.com and gantryslc.com to direct to their main site at Gantry.tv. These effectively describe who they are, what they do, and where they’re located and make it easier for clients to find them. You can work with a domain buy service to find one or more domains that will work for you.
Optimize Images
Fast Technical SEO Fixes to Increase Your Business Website’s Traffic – Optimizing images for your website is both effective and incredibly easy. You can embed keywords, phrases, and locations into the images on your website with alt text. Most CMS platforms make it easy to optimize images with a field that’s specifically for the alt text on the image. If you have to get deeper into the code of the page, simply use ‘alt=“keyword or phrase”’ into the image source code. This is how the images on your website will be found in search engine image search results, which is another effective funnel for web traffic.
Create Unique Content
Fast Technical SEO Fixes to Increase Your Business Website’s Traffic – The content on your website should not only be unique to the internet but to your company and website. When it comes to creating web content, it’s important to understand that bots that go through every website and “read” content are programmed to be as efficient as possible. This means that if the bots start finding content on your site that’s the same or similar to others, it will be considered redundant and not important.
The same concept applied to your website. If you run an e-commerce website, it’s easy to make a template for product descriptions, then copy and paste it to save time. While this is effective for you, search engine bots will see each page as the same and index the first few that were found. This means that you could have a website with 100 products, but only 20 are indexed as they have individual product descriptions.
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