Your SEO Checklist: 5 Steps to Optimizing Your Website

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Back in the old days, like 2009, there was a truckload of search engine optimization variables that Google used to rank websites on its search engine results page. However, that isn’t so anymore, and plenty has changed in the past decade. However, what is truly awesome about newer techniques and strategies is the fact that you don’t have to worry about considering every SEO factor to optimize your website on Google. That is primarily because, for Google, some variables are far more important than others.

In light of this, mentioned below are some of the most powerful SEO factors you should be paying attention to rank high in 2019. This post will dive into different factors that you need to consider for each variable, helping you to become streamlined and consistent in your optimization efforts.

Top 5 essential to crush your optimization in 2019 and beyond

1. The mobile-first factor in SEO

Google officially launched its mobile-first index back in March. However, forward-thinking online entrepreneurs and marketers adopted the mobile-first strategy way before Google introduced it. Check out some simple techniques to aligning your site’s SEO to be more mobile-friendly and responsive:

• It is important to develop your website to be responsive and adaptive to different devices and not just the PC or laptop – your website should be optimized for tablets, smartphones, etc. You can also opt for SEO services Orlando for an in-depth optimization.
• Don’t forget to scale all the images you use on your website – making them more responsive to smartphone users.
• You have to keep everything concise and to the point for your mobile customers – so ensure the meta titles you use are short and easily readable.
• Shut down annoying pop-ups that could disrupt the content on your site. You don’t need mobile users to constantly pinch or enlarge their screens to see your content.
• When it comes to mobile-first SEO, avoid long-form content. It will not do anything to boost traffic. Basically, less is more on tablets and smartphones.

2. Use technical SEO tools

Sure, you may think implementing technical strategies in SEO could be difficult or overly daunting. But don’t be afraid because there are a myriad of excellent SEO tools with a zero learning curve that you can resort to. However, the trick is to understand how you will interpret the data you collect and what you will do about it. Here are some tips:

• Your website must have a responsive design.
• Analyze your website for status code errors, iron all the kinks out.
• You can also check errors using robot.txt. If you find some, optimize them.
• You should also be looking for indexing errors using the Google Search Console, fix all the errors.
• ·Make sure there are no duplicate title tags and/or meta descriptions.
• Check the validity of your content through Google Analytics, you have to analyze which content is doing poorly and optimize it.
• One of the most common enemies of user experience is bad or broken links. Moreover, they will also inhibit your rankings. So, fix any you find.

3. Up your website speed

Page speed can either make or break your website’s optimization. As per Google’s analysis, it was identified that the average time that a web page takes to load on a mobile screen is 22 seconds. You would be surprised to know that 53% of all mobile website visitors bounce from a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load!

Poor website load speed is detrimental to the overall navigations and user experience, which is a big no-no. In addition, it is one of the most fundamental factors Google uses to rank your website. Here is what you should do to increase your speed:

• Reduce the number of HTTP requests for variables like your web pages, images, CSS, and scripts.
• Combine files that are common and compress file sizes to make them smaller, both of these factors also reduce HTTP requests.
• Ensure that JavaScript and CSS load at the same time.
• Make sure that the important files of the website load first instead of JavaScript loading first.
• Minimize the lookup time of the DNS.
• Activate browser caching.
• Don’t forget to use a CDN.
• Make sure to keep your plug-in usage at a minimum.

4. Streamline your content marketing

As per the analysis, it has been estimated that by the year 2020, up to 44-ZB or zettabytes of content and data will be created on a daily basis. To sort of put that figure into perspective, it is equivalent to more than 8 trillion songs every day. While that is promising news, you will have a bit of tough time plowing through the clutter coming up with truly unique and relevant content to stand out. However, use these tricks to make it a bit easier for yourself:

• Work on developing a streamlined content hub – you can create all your content as a resource center too.
• You should always focus on adding value, highly informative, and truly unique content to your resource hub.
• Curate content in relevance to your resource hub and never forget to interlink your content.
• Start generating news articles for your resource hub and for the content you have interlinked.
• Market your news articles or blogs on different social networking channels.
• Write on all trending topics and spread the content on your social media profiles.

5. Link building is important

One of the best factors and a variable for enhancing your search engine optimization is link building. And it has been like that for a long time. However, Google is changing the game a bit by devaluing links that do not perform well or are spammy. In simpler words, the search engine giant is going to be more proficient in identifying such links. That means you need to have quality links – mentioned below are popular link building trends today:

• Use resource pages – they are also known as Linkbait.
• Integrate BLB (Broken Link Building).
• Focus on promoting guest posting on your website. Just be sure the content is not spammy.
• Utilize backlink mining.
• Link reclamation

Wrapping up

So there you go – some of the best SEO practices that can set your website for a consistent boost in ranking and popularity.  Do you have any suggestions in this regard? Please feel free to share those with us in the comments section below.