If you are in business, you know how crucial your website is to its survival. Just having a website is no longer enough; your site must continually draw in new customers and stay one step ahead of competitors. How do you know if your site is thriving and not just surviving? You must look to the future with a search engine optimization (SEO) analysis. Here are some ways you can gauge how well your site is doing.
How visible is your site? Google it. Google is still the number-one way people access and search for things on the internet. If you enter your business name into the search field, which comes up on the third or fourth search engine results page (SERP) for Google, your business is in trouble. We will discuss how to fix this problem later.
Your Site is Spammy
If your website has too many backlinks to questionable sites, it can affect your spam score. The top search engines such as Google and Bing will penalize you if your backlinks are to sites that are pornographic, gambling or promote criminal activities or hate. While backlinks are an excellent way to aid your SEO campaign, they can be just as damaging. Use the Moz Open Link Explorer to determine if a site you have linked to will raise your spam score. Of course, if you have any unsavory backlinks, remove them from your site right away.
Link Up with Yourself
If you have found that your SERP results are low, you can boost your SEO by linking back to your own site. This practice is known as internal linking, and search engines approve of it. You can boost your SERP results by linking to old posts or pages on your site.
Relevant Content
The most significant change in search engines in the last few years is that they now look at the relevancy of content above keywords, although keywords are still important. If your content, such as a blog post, has little to do with its title, search engines won’t look at it favorably. One of the vital keys to improving your SEO is ensuring that your site uses relevant keywords and content to the goods and services your site is selling. Don’t write a blog post about a concert if your site sells umbrellas unless you can connect the two in a relevant way.
Are You Slow or Absent?
Two of the major factors search engines take into ranking your site are page speed and downtime. Both of these issues are usually related to your site host. You need to be sure you have a site host that can handle large traffic, so your site’s load speeds don’t take over three seconds. If your site takes too long to load, it will impact your bounce rate, bringing negative attention from search engines. Worse than slow load times are large amounts of downtime. Search engines will penalize severely for sites that are always down. After all, the purpose of a search engine is to recommend sites to its users. They won’t recommend a site if it’s not going to be there when someone clicks on the link.
Be Original
If you want your site to be blacklisted for sure and wreck your SEO completely, then plagiarism is the way to go. Plagiarism will draw the internet equivalency of the death penalty. It sometimes takes years to get off a search engine’s blacklist. It’s easy to stay off a blacklist, don’t copy and paste another site’s content. If you create your own content, your SERP rankings will be higher.
In Conclusion
If you follow these suggestions, your SERP rankings will improve now and for years. Have questions about how to elevate your website in search? Contact us!