10 Ways On How Can A Site Be Optimized For Search Engines

These days, every business is trying to take advantage of the digital landscape and rise among the rest to dominate the industry. Since there are so many website in the market, it can be a tough competition. Thankfully, you can stay ahead of your competitors with the help of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you would like to learn more on how can a site be optimized for search engines, read on to find out.

What is SEO and how does SEO work?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves enhancing your website’s pages to improve visibility on search engines like Google and drive more conversions. By using SEO, businesses can appear in search results for relevant keywords related to their products or services.

When your website aligns with the key factors that search engines consider, such as content quality, backlinks, and mobile-friendliness, your chances of ranking higher increase. This leads to better visibility in search results.

Why do you need SEO? 

As a small business owner, you may wonder if investing in SEO is worthwhile. SEO is essential because it helps promote your products or services to people actively searching for them online. Without it, you could be missing valuable leads or sales opportunities. Additionally, SEO helps build brand awareness, expanding your audience reach and making your business more recognizable to potential customers.

10 Tips On How Can A Site Be Optimized For Search Engines

Optimizing your website to ensure higher rankings on search engines can be complicated. To help you learn the best ways, we listed down the top methods on how can a site be optimized for search engines: 

1. Ensure relevant keywords are included

The most important factor to ensure a site is optimized for search engines would be when relevant keywords are spread across each website page. It’s crucial for search engines to pick up these keywords and display your website on search results as it matches the user’s intent. There are several places you can implement keywords such as meta tags, headings and URLs. 

Use the keyword tools such as SEMRush or Google Keyword Planner to identify the appropriate keywords to be included within the website. 

While performing keyword research, there are several factors needed to be taken into consideration such as volume, difficulty and intent. 

• Volume: This involves how many users search for this keyword on average per month. 
• Difficulty: This involves the competitors websites and how difficult it would be to rank for this keyword in comparison with them. 
• Intent: This involves what kind of search intent the keywords are for such as whether its navigational informational or commercial. 

2. Use SEO-friendly urls

Ditch the long URLs of your website and make them SEO-friendly instead. How? Well, you could include the keywords within the URLs and ensure the length is not too long. Besides that, try to use words instead of symbols or numbers. Try using separators between the words so that it’s more readable. 

For example:

A good URL:
https://www.brandswift.com.my/top-cleaning-services/

A bad URL:
https://www.brandswift.com.my/top-10-cleaning-services-that-offer-a-wide-range-of-services/

https://www.brandswift.com.my/webdesign12345.html

3. Write quality content

Google favours quality content over quantity. Try to focus on ensuring your website content is free from plagiarism and offers solutions or value to the target audience. Avoid keyword stuffing as it makes the content low-quality and doesn’t provide any value to the audience.  While writing SEO content, the keywords should be spread out evenly throughout the entire article. Make use of your target keyword as well as multiple keyword phrases so that your article can rank for various keywords instead of just one or two. 

Don’t forget to include your personal experiences and expertise while writing the content. This showcases that your website is authoritative and credible. Additionally, do include SEO formatting within your content such as heading tags, italics or bolds. Not only does it help to improve your SEO, but it also encourages visitors to stay on your page longer and browse your website. 

4. Create proper meta tags

Meta tags, which are known as HTML tags, are important as search engines crawl your website and read this information. Ensure you have keywords and other important information within the meta tags content. Writing good meta tags also help visitors to find what they’re looking for and increase the chances of them clicking into your website. 

The title metadata is the most important for your website as it appears at the top of the browser window. Therefore, you should write a good one which includes the keywords as well. It should be under 60 characters. 

The description metadata is the description displayed on search engines at the bottom of the page title. Include proper sentences and include your keywords naturally. It should be under 155 characters. 

The keyword metadata involves all the keywords that you wish to rank for. Keep them short between 3 to 7 keyword phrases and 1 to 4 words each. 

5. Boost website speed

One of the most important factors for how can a site be optimized for search engines is the website speed. The website should not take long to load as visitors’ attention span is short. Most of the time, they have no patience and will exit the website if the loading speed is slow. Ensure your website loads quickly such as compressing the image file sizes and minifying the CSS, Javascript or HTML by getting rid of unnecessary codes or comments. 

6. Implement internal and external links

Links are important to ensure maximum SEO performance. For a site to be optimized for search engines, a proper internal linking structure should be implemented throughout the website. The anchor text of the internal links should be relevant to the website URL. This also helps the user to explore other parts of your website, reducing the overall bounce rate. You should include atleast two internal links within your website content. 

As for the external linking, ensure these are not from spam websites and from authoritative, legitimate websites. Quality links are more important than quantity. This also signals to search engines that your website is credible and trustworthy. It’s recommended to atleast include one external link in your website content. 

Additionally, backlinks, also known as off-page SEO, is important to gain more traffic to your website. Backlinks involve other authoritative websites linking your website within their own website content. 

7. Optimize your website images and videos

Media are a key factor in influencing a website’s SEO performance too. One of the ways on how can a site be optimized for search engines is to ensure the images and videos are properly optimized to avoid them affecting the website’s user experience and page speed.  Besides that, for images, ensure each image has an alt text describing the image and with the relevant keywords included.

8. Check for mobile-responsiveness

Since most users these days tend to use mobile devices to browse websites. Hence, it’s now more important than ever to ensure your website is mobile-optimized. Besides being user-friendly for customers, having a mobile-responsive website is also one of the key factors of SEO as Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing. 

9. Use the right headings

A website should also include appropriate relevant headings to optimize for search engines. This is because search engines will crawl these headings, which are HTML elements, and thus improve your search rankings. Therefore, it’s vital to include keywords within your headings as well. 

The main heading, also known as H1 or the page title, should always include the main keyword you’d like to rank for as well as matches the user’s intent. The sub-headings such as H2 and H3 are headings in which after H1, the search engines will crawl the rest of the headings to determine the overall value of your content. By using proper heading structure, it gives search engines a better opportunity to understand your website content better. 

10. Monitor website performance

SEO is a long-term game. Continuous monitoring of website performance is crucial so that you can adjust your SEO strategy accordingly. If you don’t check how your website is doing, then you won’t know which strategy is the most effective. Some of the key factors to monitor would be organic website traffic, click-through-rate, bounce rate, and so on. Some of the tools you can use to monitor are Google Search Console, SEMRush and Ahrefs. 

Refer to this brief guide on how to setup a Google Analytics account: 

Step 1: Create a Google Analytics Account: Start by signing up with your Google account and providing the necessary details.

Step 2: Add a Property: Set up your property by configuring the reporting time zone, industry category, and other relevant details for accurate data tracking.

Step 3: Create a Data Stream: Enter the website URL or location from which you wish to track analytics.

Step 4: Implement Tracking Tags: Insert the required tags for data collection. The method will vary based on your website’s hosting platform or structure.

Step 5: Adjust Settings: Fine-tune additional settings to collect and analyze data in line with your goals.

Refer to this brief guide on how to setup a Google Search Console account: 

Step 1: Create a Google Account: If you don’t already have one, set up a Google account.

Step 2: Add Your Website to Google Search Console: Enter your site’s URL and complete the verification process to confirm ownership.

Step 3: Learn Google Search Console: Explore available tools and resources to understand how to analyze the data effectively.

Step 4: Regularly Monitor Search Console: Keep an eye on updates and any unusual site activities, especially after content changes, by reviewing Search Console data regularly.

Other Factors That Can Impact A Site’s Seo

Here are some of other factors that can impact the website’s SEO: 

1. Quality of content 

High quality content is important as search engines prioritize valuable content. Try to ensure that your website contains well-written and informative content. It’s important to keep all your content up-to-date as well. 

2. Keywords 

Keywords are crucial when it comes to SEO as it helps search engines to understand what your website is all about. You should ensure the keywords are included throughout the content suh as headings and meta tags. 

3. Website traffic 

If your website has high traffic, it’s a sign that your website is valuable to the target audience. Search engines consider websites with high traffic to be of value and tend to rank them higher. Some of the factors besides high website traffic would be the engagement rate of the audience such as clicks or the total time spent on the website. 

4. Overall user experience 

User experience involves the page speed of the website as well as how aesthetic the design is. It’s also important to ensure your website is mobile-friendly as most users these days navigate using mobile devices. 

Conclusion

All in all, there are many ways on how can a site be optimized for search engines, but these are just some of the most common and important ones. There’s no one-size-fits-its-all solution, so it’s best to keep experimenting to see which method works for you. Learn more on how long does it take to optimize a website.