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4 Ways to Improve Your Website's Ranking (SEO)

Uchenna Ani-Okoye - Guest Blog Post on SEO
What do you think of, when you see the term ‘SEO’? When you’re trying to improve the SEO ranking of your website, where do you like to focus all your energy?

For most webmasters, they like to put the vast majority of their time and energy into sourcing keywords. However, if you’ve been putting all your time and effort into finding and using the right keywords, but are still not getting the kinds of results that you want, then maybe it’s time you took other factors into consideration. 

The algorithms of these search engines, not only look at your keywords and their relevance to the search term, but they also look at user experience, which includes things such as: how long a visitor is staying on your website, broken links, bounce rates and inbound and outbound links, just to name a few. 

If you’re able to get people to stay on your site for longer, then you can increase your site's ranking, and this can be done, simply by improving on-page factors for your site. 

Using the right keywords to get people onto your page, is only the beginning. If you adopt the approach of optimizing your site for those individuals that like to use the search engines, you will naturally see how important user-friendliness is. 

In this article, I intend to discuss the various factors that you can use and should consider when attempting to improve the SEO rankings of your website:

4 Simple But Powerful Ways to Improve Your Website's Search Ranking - Guest Post
4 Ways to Immediately Improve SEO Ranking of Your Website

1. Stick with Originality

When I speak of originality, I’m simply referring to duplicate content, or, the same content existing on more than one URL – which is something that you’ll want to avoid. Republishing content from other websites is not only illegal but is also capable of adversely affecting the rankings of your website. 

There are tools like SiteLiner and CopyScape that you can use to check whether or not your website has duplicate content on it. So I suggest you dive further into that, for SEO sake. 

2. Optimise Site Images

Images and pictures are a great addition to any website. 

But, if you want them to improve your pages SEO ranking, you have to ensure that they are properly optimized. This includes factors such as file size and format. 

Images that are large in file size, are capable of slowing your website down, which will hurt its rankings. 

Thus, you’ll want to compress and resize images, to optimize them. 

It’s also possible for you to put keywords into your images, whether it’s through the ALT tag or filename

For example, if you had a website that was selling Window tiles or some other bath product. 

Instead of using a generic filename for the image, like ‘tiles’, you could name it something like ‘best tiles for large baths’.

3. Optimise On-Site Elements

While title tags still carry some weight, when it comes to SEO, META descriptions have all but lost their ranking influence. Despite that, Meta descriptions do create the perfect opportunity for the webmaster to put his/her marketing talents to use, by creating compelling descriptions that will encourage people to click on the link. 

You want to ensure that every page on your website has both title tags and Meta descriptions and that they are both optimized and relevant. If they’re too short or too long, that can have an adverse effect on your overall rankings, which is why an audit is your best option, to verify and fix any large-scale issues on your site. 

Other on-page elements that you must factor in when attempting to rank in the major search engines is H1 tags, external and internal links, content length, text formatting, bullet points, images, and ads. 

4. Optimise Site’s Speed

The speed of a website is a ranking factor in the search engines and it also affects the conversation rate of a website. Amazon calculated that a one second increase in time to load a page, cost them in excess of $1.6 billion in sales, over the course of a year. Other studies have shown that over 40% of visitors will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load up. Despite these facts, many site owners still fail to put in a sufficient amount of time and effort into improving their sites load speed. 

There are many tools, like Pingdom, that you can use to check the load time of your website, such tools will give you a breakdown of all the various elements that are contributing to its times. From this information, you can work on improving your sites load speeds. Moving your website over to a dedicated line is one very effective way of reducing load times, but it’s also one of the most costly, so these are factors for you to consider. 

About Author

Uchenna Ani-Okoye - Guest Blog Post on SEO


Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website - Compuchenna: All Your Computer Questions Answered!


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