Contents
Resources, Capabilities, and Core Competencies
Optimize your site to maximize your site’s revenue potential. A well-performing web page is important for SEO and users – don’t neglect either of them. Bearing in mind, with the use of this service and other digital marketing tools out there, being able to help grow your business and reach potential clients couldn’t be easier. Plus, we can all do with a bit of help sometimes.
Frequently audit and check your site to make sure that it’s behaving as you would expect – and that you’re still offering the same great experience you did when you first went live. This is just common sense when auditing as this will help you maximize your site. Here are seven easy-to-implement SEO strategies for optimum site performance – take on these habits and create a site that is both beautiful and easy to use. For more information, I have linked a guide of the four signs your business website needs an SEO audit which may help you look at your website in a more critical way.
Speeding up your website
Speed is important for everything – search engines, users, business, sales – go for speed over complex designs, or choose a designer who can deliver complexity without sacrificing speed.
- Background hero images look lovely, but they can be huge and are often guilty of slowing sites way down. Make sure that your images are properly compressed and that the images aren’t too big. Mobile users won’t appreciate scrolling for ages just to get to the first content heading.
- There are loads of speed plugins you can use to compress images, enable browser caching and compress site code. But other than just installing loads of plugins (which can actually slow your site down), it’s a good idea to invest in good development to make sure that your site is built well from the ground up.
- The accelerated mobile pages project is there to help you speed up your mobile site – use it.
Data analysis & feedback loop
Dynamic indexing
Image SEO
Don’t neglect the power of images and make sure that you are using images that enhance your site user-experience, not detract from it.
- Use the right image file formats and sizes for speed. If you’re not sure, speak to your designer or developer.
- Submit an image sitemap to search engines if your site is made up of loads of image galleries.
- Image alt texts are there for you to use them. They are easy to manage in most modern content management systems and should take mere minutes to update. Use them to improve the search engine experience of your website.
- Think about image relevancy – bland stock images are going to turn people off and won’t help you build a distinctive look and feel for your brand.
Great content
Mark up your content
A simple way to help you get more out of your SEO is to use easy-to-implement markup language on key content pieces that are likely to rank. Mark up your content to tell search engines more about your site’s content – it flags up products, prices, reviews, and other crucial content markers. These are are then displayed in the dynamic rich snippets box on search results pages.
- Always think about what people want to achieve, what problems they have, what questions they are asking, and how you can help them. Answering these questions for people in the form of content and how-to’s is a great place to start creating more rankable content.
- Content markup is very valuable for mobile searches as the rich snippets box fills so much of the mobile search results page.
Invest in UX now
You might get away with a non user-friendly site for a short period of time, but if you’re not heavily investing in UX now, you will see your site decay, and rankings and engagement will eventually fall.
To ensure that you will have a well-performing site for years to come, you better start investing in researching your site’s users and audience now. What are they searching for? What elements do they find most useful and why? How can you make their experience of your site even better?
What site performance issues have you noticed online before? Which ones do you find the most frustrating?
Gareth Simpson – Technical SEO &Startup Founder
Gareth has worked as an SEO for almost a decade now and has recently started working as a freelance SEO in Bristol. His SEO specialisms are content and blogger outreach…and he likes green tea. You can follow him on Twitter @SimpsonGareth.