How Can Google Optimizing Factors Help Your Website?

Let’s say you have a feature-rich website with a user-friendly interface. What now? Is the job done? Of course, not. You need website visitors to drive traffic and, therefore, sales. 

But how will you get visitors to check out your website? 

I guess your answer is going to be Google. 

Correct. Google will bring visitors, but only if your website is optimized. If your website is not SEO-friendly, you will probably find your page link on the 10th page of Google’s search results. 

Well, certain proven ways will help you increase your website’s Google position and may even do wonders for your business. 

Before we dig into the ways that will make your website search engine friendly, let’s take a quick look at what affects your website and SEO.

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  Dwell time

If you are unaware, dwell time is the time a visitor will spend checking out a website before clicking back to the search results page. This is one of the critical factors to consider for user experience. You might think it is not a big deal, but it is. This particular metric tells the search engine, in this case, Google, how valuable the content is he or she found on your website. 

You might have a different content strategy to keep the visitors engaged. But these search engines’ algorithms don’t work that way. Let’s say your website content is short-form and doesn’t take much time to read. On top of that, you gave essential information right at the beginning so that you don’t waste your visitor’s time. It’s a good strategy, but Google will consider it otherwise. In short, yes, dwell time matters, affecting SEO significantly. Having said that, don’t unnecessarily increase your content length just to change this metric. It won’t do any good either. 

• Page speed

Put yourself in your website visitor’s shoes and tell me–Would you wait if the website you clicked on took forever to load? Then why would your visitors? The speed of the page is equally important and can affect its ranking on the search engine results page. What makes a website slow? 

Honestly, a lot of reasons. First, unnecessary code and overuse of plugins can considerably slow down a website. So check with your web development services company and consider removing junk code. This will significantly improve the page speed. 

One more thing you do to improve the page speed is uninstall unwanted site plugins. Take a good look at all those site plugins and decide which ones you need to keep the site up and running, which can be removed, and which ones need to be fixed. 

Bad plugins can impact the front end of your website. So think deeply and get rid of all those junk plugins to increase the overall website speed. 

• 100% responsive

With rising smartphone usage, you need to optimize your website for mobile users. And there’s no way around it. Your website should be 100% responsive so that your website visitors and customers can effortlessly browse your site without any errors. If you are thinking about which platform or device you should keep the site responsive for, then let me tell you—Every smartphone. All major iOS, Android, and Microsoft smartphones should have access to your site. 

Many ready-made themes are available in the market that is mobile-friendly. All you need to do is add your content and CTA. You are good to go. Keep an eye on your site’s performance on various devices and check the Google Analytics dashboard from time to time. You can also run a mobile site speed test if you think the site is not performing to its best.   

• Latest data

This is another critical factor that affects SEO. What is the latest data? Also known as recent data, provides website visitors with authentic and relevant information that gives a positive reader experience. Leveraging AI marketing tools to incorporate the latest data and insights is a brilliant idea.

Regardless of the niche of the content, when you hyperlink a credible source that published original data, you indirectly tell search engines that the site you linked is valuable and pertinent to your visitors. This will positively affect your website and SEO in the long run. 

Now that we have seen what factors affect SEO and website, let’s look at how to optimize website content effectively.

• Use long tail keywords

If you think content optimization is about adding infinite keywords throughout the site, you couldn’t be more wrong. Doing this will do more harm than good since search engines like Google consider this keyword stuffing. 

If you don’t know what keyword stuffing is, add as many keywords as possible just to get the site a high ranking in organic search. 

The key is to use keywords minimally and naturally so your readers don’t feel unnatural or forced. 

One way to do that is to leverage one or two long-tail keywords per page or blog post. Instead of focusing on too many short keywords, consider keeping just one or two long-tail keywords throughout the content. 

How is less good? 

These long-tail keywords are often questions that users use to search for content on Google. For instance, “how to lose weight” is much more impactful in terms of SEO than the short keyword “Weight loss.”

• Optimize meta description

A meta description is often the text that appears on the search engine results page. This short description will give readers a gist of the page and its contents. It will provide them with the information they need to decide whether or not your content is what they are searching for. If it is, they will click the link or else not. 

The challenge with the meta description is that you can only use 160 characters to give your website visitors an insight into what the page will be about. 

Apart from a compelling and intriguing, your meta description should also have the long-tail keyword you used in the content. 

Of course, doing this won’t guarantee your ranking on the Google page. However, it will undoubtedly improve your chances of getting a better rank. 

• Add image alt text

As rightly said, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Your website shouldn’t only contain text. It should also have images that can act as supporting files for your content. But the trick here is Google doesn’t search for images. Instead, it will look for images with image alt text.

What is image alt text?

End of the day, a machine is a machine. It can’t see an image the same way a human does. That’s why an image’s alt text exists. It will help the search engine identify what the image is about and what it contains. This will help those images rank better, leading the website to a better position. 

For instance, if you are adding the above image, instead of the file name IMG12345, the text of the image should be “Golden retriever puppies in a basket.”

The more accurate the image alt text is, the higher the chances of better ranking. Try to be as specific as possible while keeping it under 125 characters. 

• Avoid overuse of topic tags

From LinkedIn to Twitter, everybody uses tags for their posts. Web development solutions are no different. Topic tags can assist you in organizing your blog content effortlessly. That being said, you can’t overuse topic tags as they can also be harmful.

If you have too many similar tags, your website will get penalized by Google for posting duplicate content. For instance, you created a topic tag for a blog post. With this, you also created a new page where the content from those topic tags will appear. If you utilize more similar tags for the same blog post, Google will consider it as you are publishing the same content multiple times throughout your website. 

Need more clarity? Consider the words blog, blog post, blog page, and blogging. They are too similar and sound almost the same to be used for one blog post. 

This is not all. Apart from the above-mentioned tips, you could also try updating current content, reviewing Google Analytics metrics frequently, including user-friendly URL structures, and many more.

Even though you can’t implement each one of the SEO practices, you can let your web development agency know that you want to incorporate as many as possible. As your website grows, you can slowly start implementing these practices.

With each SEO practice implementation, you will learn something new about website visitors and customers. Carefully evaluate your current website for strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for growth for climbing the search engine results page ranks. Soon, you will be on track to delivering relevant and accurate content that your readers will love.