To get as much Google traffic to your website as possible you need to make your website Google friendly. This means that you need to ensure that certain aspects of your website are going to please Google and make them want to rank your pages higher in the Google search results.
You are in control of all four of the factors in this article. Choosing to ignore these factors can be dangerous to your search engine ranking results. We recommend reading the details here and making sure that you implement them all so that you are ready from some Google love.
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Optimize your Website
Google is a machine and you need to help it as much as possible by optimizing your website and all of its content. It is essential that Google understands what your website is about and the individual topics that your webpages cover.
You need to perform keyword research and then use the keywords you discover to optimize your website content.
- Each one of the pages on your website and blog should have the main keyword in the page title as well as the meta description.
- Choose related keywords to add to your body text as well.
- Use header tags (H2, H3) to break up your content and include keywords in some of these.
- Optimize all images that you use by adding keywords to the alt tags and saving your images with keywords in the file name e.g. dog-training.png
- Structure your website in specific categories. This is easy if you use the WordPress CMS.
The more that your website makes sense, the more Google will appreciate it. It takes a bit of time and effort to optimize your website and your pages, but this is worth t as you will significantly improve your chances of higher rankings in Google.
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Make sure that your Pages Load Fast
Google users hate waiting for a page to load. If it takes more than 4 seconds to load your webpages, they are very likely to go elsewhere. Page loading speed is something that Google takes very seriously and if you have a slow website then they are not going to rank you very high.
Use the free Page Speed Insights checker from Google to test the load speed of some of your pages. A good test will be on a page that only contains text such as a privacy page. This should load extremely fast. If you get a low score with this, you need to think about moving to another web host.
There are web-hosting companies today that offer very fast servers that use SSD storage rather than conventional hard drives. At first, these hosts were expensive, but now their prices are closer to slower web hosts.
Keep in mind that inexpensive (cheap) hosting can cause your website to load slow and negatively impact your search engine rankings.
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HTTPS Security
Another thing that Google takes really seriously is the security of websites that appear in its search results. These days, every website should have an SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate installed which provides encryption.
Many web-hosting companies are providing SSL certificates free of charge to their customers. Some are still charging for this. It doesn’t matter what the situation is with your web host, you need an SSL certificate so do what it takes to get one.
Not sure if your website is using an SSL certificate? Look for the “closed padlock” in the address bar of your browser (generally immediately to the left of your website url).
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Mobile Responsive
With so many mobile device users these days it is essential that your website is responsive and will provide a good experience no matter whether a computer, smartphone or tablet is used. If you have a WordPress website then there are many themes that will automatically do this.
Not sure if your website is mobile friendly? Check it out at Google’s mobile friendly testing site.
Need help with any of these four items? Reach out to the team at Valorous Circle – we would be happy to assist you!
This Valorous Circle blog post on keyword research contains licensed content from a third-party source.
