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Google traffic is one of the most sustainable and effective ways of generating organic traffic. To effectively utilize Google as an inbound traffic generator, you have to prepare your website to be search engine optimized. There are a variety of ways you can improve your SEO game. The following are several website auditing hacks that you can use to bolster your search rankings.
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Fix Up the Technical SEO First
One of the easiest ways you can start beefing up your SEO is by fixing up the technical SEO aspects of your website. There are a lot of tools available that you can try, but one of the best free options you can use immediately is Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider. This free tool allows you to do helpful check-ups on your page’s onsite SEO.
Update Your Titles
One of the first steps you can take to fix the technical SEO is to look at what needs to be updated on your site. Your article titles are an important factor for your website, and you want to make sure that the keywords in your titles are displayed early on in the text. The pages should be focused on a specific topic, ideally with a long-tailed keyword that you can use to drive specific traffic to your page. An important key point to remember is that duplicate titles are bad, so don’t do it! Make sure each page title is unique!
Create a Strong Hook In Your Meta Descriptions
The meta description is the blurb that shows under a website link when you do a search. This is where people look when they see your website to check if the article is relevant to them or not. Not only should this section be focused on the keyword you’re using, but it should also be written to pull the visitor towards your site. A detailed but concise description will invite more people to your site. Again, the same rule of thumb is that your meta descriptions should be unique!
Look For Page Issues
Performing a website audit allows you to see your website from a macro point of view. This gives you an easier way of identifying problems or issues with your website. For example:
- Do you have any dead links on your website?
- Is your 404 page working?
- Do you have any pages that are set to “noindex”?
Basically, you want to fix these problems for both Google and your users. User experience is a huge factor for Google’s search rankings, and a website that doesn’t work as intended is a huge turn-off.
Improve User Experience
As explained before, this is a great aspect to fix to improve your search rankings. By creating a better user experience for your users, they’ll be more inclined to visit your site on more than one occasion. Some examples of things to look at to possibly fix are the user flow that visitors go through on your site, the design elements of your page when they’re looking at your site, and seeing if your webpage is responsive and mobile-friendly. It could also just be the color scheme you chose. Tailor it to your branding and your customer’s perception of what a good website experience should be.
Balance the Visuals and Text
You don’t want your page to be too text-heavy, but you can’t go about creating a website that’s dominated by images. A healthy balance goes a long way in creating a comfortable reading experience for visitors. Having images also gives you an opportunity to target more keywords by creating alternate texts for the image, which Google crawls through as well. The image text is an excellent location to capitalize on.
Take a Look At Your DNS Settings
This part is a little more technical, but you want to make sure the DNS settings on your page are working properly so that bots don’t receive errors when they’re crawling through your site. To check this, you can use Google’s Search Console to find the current status of your page. As long as you find a green check mark on the DNS portion, you’re good!
Website auditing can be difficult, but approach the problem a step at a time, and you’ll improve your search rankings in no time. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. SEO rankings take time to deliver, but it’s worth the effort!
References:
Computer Hope | How To Test and Check A Web Page For Errors
Big Leap | The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Using Screaming Frog
Digital Citizen | Simple questions: What is DNS? How do I see my DNS settings in Windows?
Linkio | A New Anchor Text Optimization Strategy for 2019
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