Make Your Meta Descriptions Clickable
Each of your web pages will have its own unique meta description – a snippet that appears under your page title in the search results, outlining exactly what’s on your page and why someone should click on it.
From a ranking perspective, these meta descriptions are one of the most important and most visible elements to consider. In essence, they act as a mini advert for your website. In order to attract customers, the more enticing they can be, the better.
Keep your title tag and URL short. Then, write each description in a way that is both attractive and informative, arousing the viewer’s curiosity within a 150-word limit.
Publish Long-Form Content
Research has found that the longer and more in-depth your content is, the better.
Obviously your Contact Page doesn’t need to contain 1,500 words in order to do its job. But rich content like blog posts or case studies, which goes into depth on a topic, is Google ranking gold.
Authenticity can increase for longer posts, with Google recognizing deeper copy as more relevant than a shorter post that leaves out information. Plus, the more well-researched a topic is, the more confident and relevant it comes across – two things Google looks for when determining its rankings.
Structure and layout are equally important to long-form content. Rather than having your copy as one large piece of text, break it up using relevant subheadings that utilize the keywords your target audience is likely to be searching for.
Add bullet lists where you can, as well as any useful imagery or videos that supports the information you’re sharing.
The better your content quality, the better Google will see it and the higher it will rank. Simple, right?
Use Internal Links
It’s great to have lots of interesting, well-written, and informative pages on your website, but without the correct SEO techniques, nobody will actually see them.
Ensuring each page has the right topic tags, is well-structured, and features relevant keywords is one thing – but linking each page or post to other pages on your site can make a big difference in how Google perceives your overall website.
Internal links help your audience move around your website, and they help search engines understand what your pages are about and how they relate to one another. Look for opportunities to link to your other pages and posts throughout each page – but be careful not to overdo it.
Google’s current algorithm scours the web for the best quality content that matches a search. Stuffing links into your copy without purpose will not only compromise the quality of the content you’ve written, but it will also set Google’s alarm bells ringing.
As with adding relevant imagery or multimedia, only add links to a page where they fit naturally to enhance the user experience. This, in turn, will provide Google’s spiders with several juicy sources to dig their teeth into.
Make Your Website Quicker
In today’s day and age of technological advances and high-speed internet, consumers look for ease, convenience and – most importantly – speed.
If your website is slow to load, especially on mobile devices, you’re not just off-putting to your customers. Search engines don’t like to send people to slow sites, either. Google wants to keep people happily using its product because it delivers the results they want, which is why it ranks websites in the first place.
In other words, slow websites spell trouble for your Google ranking, resulting in pages landing much lower in the search engine results. This translates to fewer page views, less advertising revenue and, ultimately, fewer conversions – all of which is terrible news.
To combat this, the first thing you should do is think about upgrading your hosting plan to improve your website’s speed. (Have you heard about Anvil, the affordable custom website solution that includes dedicated hosting?)
You should also always optimize the images on your website, because the larger they are in terms of file size, the longer it will take for them to load.
Once you’ve done that, review your website’s plugins and pare them down (without compromising your website) to just those you regularly use. Aside from taking up valuable space, out-of-date plugins can be responsible for security vulnerabilities. If they’re not useful, get rid of them.
Finally, think about caching your web pages. This will enable visitors to access your pages more quickly in the future, since the page’s data will already be stored in the user’s database from the first time they accessed it.
