Especially now, when a multitude of your visitors will access your website via mobile devices, design your site such that it’s completely responsive and mobile friendly – it should also load quickly.
- Leverage meta keywords and description tags. These tags are typically used to specify the search keywords and description respectively for your site.
- Analyze which keywords your competitors are using and whether they are in fact successful. It may be a good idea to actually research the best keywords to use for optimizing your site. Some useful resources include:
- SEOBook Keyword Analyzer http:// tools.seobook.com/ general/ keyword-densit
- www.semrush.com
- You can quickly and easily build up a massive list of relevant keywords using the Mergewords tool at www.mergewords.com
- Use the HTTPS protocol for secure SSL communications. Google rewards sites that are secure using this protocol. If it is not secure already, upgrade your site to use an SSL certificate.
- Use of Google AdWords appropriately. For good examples of successful Google ADWords campaigns and why they crush the competition, this article is a good starting point:
https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/successful-adwords-ads/
- Don’t forget to check how fast each page on your website loads using the following URL: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
- Implement HTTP/2 on your website for accelerated mobile pages. HTTP/2 (originally named HTTP/2.0) is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol used by the World Wide Web. The Google team announced in 2016 that sites equipped with accelerated mobile pages technology are going to be rewarded with expanded exposure. So that’s always a plus!
- Implement sitemap.xml and robots.txt to facilitate search indexing. This enhances your listing in Google. It is also a good idea to set up a Google+ presence.
- Check whether your site is mobile friendly https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly
- Test the quality of your website’s HTML code here: https://validator.w3.org/nu/. Quality over quantity!
- Stay up to date with how Google ranks websites. Download the SearchMetrics white paper from the following site: http://www.searchmetrics.com/knowledge-base/ranking-factors/
- Keep your website content fresh and up to date, which also applies to your social media content. If your site has high-quality content and backlinks from reputable sources, your site is more likely to be considered a trustworthy source, and more likely to rank higher in the search results.
- Diligently build external links to your site. You can rank higher with less links by focusing on building links from relevant sites. Increasing relevance like this is a powerful strategy and can lead to high rankings in competitive areas. Here are several directories to which you can submit your website:
- http://www.manta.com/claim
- http://www.linkedin.com/company
- http://www.hotfrog.com
- http://www.citysearch.com
- A link from the Better Business Bureau is among one of the best that you can have.
- Markup your site using www.schema.org, which is a joint effort, in the spirit of www.sitemaps.org, to improve the web by creating a structured data markup schema supported by major search engines.
If you like what you’ve read so far, feel free to get in touch with us. We’d love to discuss your marketing and SEO needs.
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