5 SEO tings to move the needle
What's good?
It's the month of Ramadaan and Eid is around the corner. So I've got a few extra SEO tips as an Eid pressie for you. You're welcome.
Moving on...
I got asked a great question the other night at a networking event.
"what's the best SEO thing anyone can do to get results"
These were their exact words but let's not get hung up on semantics.
Naturally, I said "it depends" - LOLZ.
But fr tho, there's a lot of things you can do to give your website a jolt and start seeing an impact sooner (as in, days not months).
Now "it depends" on the age of the site, the size of the site, whether there's been any SEO done before and what you're actually able to do (permissions notwithstanding).
But here's 5 SEO tips to help you get going in the right direction (and a few bonus tips at the end!)
Look at your page titles. This is huge and makes a difference. Keep it relevant and simple. Don't stuff keywords. Obvs.
Look at your internal links. This is an SEO superpower and gives humans and search engines more context and helps them discover content on your site. Make life easier for everyone!
Look at all pages of your site on different devices and screen sizes. This is more of a usability thing but too many websites fail the user experience test. Make sure it's easy to use your site (finding stuff, making a purchase, filling out a form, and so on). Also, it's a good time to look at formats and layouts - avoid big blocks of text and consider different font sizes and line heights.
Look at your actual content. Read it. And read it again. Get others to read it. Does it make sense today? Does it need a refresh? Are there typos you missed? Are you trying to go after too many keywords per page? (eg. a generic Services page for all your related but different services). Rewrite it if it's as boring as bat guano.
Look at the images and videos on your site. Are they relevant? Could you use more images/videos? Could you remove some? Have you used alt text for images? Do the images and videos take forever to load? Fix that up, quick. Nobody has patience anymore.
Bonus tip: test your site speed. This should really be a developer issue, not an SEO issue (we have enough problems already) but use GTMetrix, Pingdom and PageSpeed Insights to test your site. If the speed is slower than a sloth on acid, you've got work to do (or your dev does). It's an ongoing battle.
Bonus bonus tip: Submit your website's XML sitemap to Google Search Console. It's helpful, what can I say. And while you're at it, make sure you've got domain level verification in GSC. You get a more complete picture (but it's ok to do it other ways too - helps with isolating data and gleaning insights and what not).
Extra super bonus tip: add a self referencing canonical tag to your homepage. Helps ensure the correct version of the page is served.
See, I told you SEO was simple. It aint a consommé.
Eid Mubaarak to all who celebrate.
And may everyone be overwhelmed with peace, happiness and all that sweet sweet cheddar.
Peace,
Jaaved
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