Google SEO: How to Give Your Site a Fighting Chance in 2016!

As we have mentioned on several occasions in the past, your business website is an essential component of your online business. This is because your business success will mostly depend on what you’re able to achieve with your website. It should be able to do a whole lot of things for this to happen.

For example, as a website owner or “webmaster” your site should constantly drive a healthy flow of visitors since the website would be useless if no-one visits it. It’s pertinent to note that the higher the traffic generated, the higher the number of visitors that can converted to customers! Also, if you run a business, it’s crucial that you grow your site’s popularity otherwise, you won’t be able to achieve online brand awareness.

One of the ways that you can help your website to do all these effectively is optimizing it for the search engines. This is one reason why SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is a hot topic these days.

So, What Is SEO?

SEO refers to the tasks you need to carry out to make your site hot or, at least, interesting enough for search engines to care about it. Fact is, if you think your site isn’t popular right now there are plenty of practical steps you can take to improve your site’s search engine ranking and it into a high performer.

In today’s blog post, I’m want to share with you some dynamite SEO tips that will help you do this. Hope you make good use of this information.

That being said, here’s how to do Google SEO for your site in 2016 for better results:

1. Make Sure Your Web Host Is Up To Scratch

It might shock you to learn that sometimes the problem doesn’t lie with the site itself. Rather, it can be with the physical hardware it gets hosted on! There are hundreds of thousands of Web hosts these days.

Each one offers varying features and performance. Did you know that search engines like Google penalize sites on slow servers? As you can imagine, that’s quite a worrying thought.

Before we optimize your website, the first thing you need to do is check the server’s performance. There are several free tools you can use to do this. I recommend using the Pingdom Website Speed Test. It also allows you to test your site from various locations around the world. All you need to do is pick one closest to your area.

When the test completes, check out the Page Analysis tab. How much time gets spent at the “connect” and “wait” stages? If the results are high for either, run a couple more tests. Quite often, high times mean your site is on a slow server.

If that’s the case, I recommend moving your website over to a VPS. VPSServer.com is a good place to start. A VPS or Virtual Private Server will offer higher performance and dedicated system resources. A shared server or host won’t guarantee anything like that to your site.

2. Strip Off The Bloat

Assuming the hosting side of things is OK, it’s now time to turn your attention to your website. Most sites these days run content management systems like WordPress. They are brilliant because they make it quick and easy to publish content. They also offer a plethora of customization and layout options.

The only downside to database-driven websites like that is the excess fat they carry! Examples include inefficient plugins, templates and other website “widgets”. Take the opportunity to uninstall what you don’t need.

All too often, ready-made themes come with plugins that you’ll never use. Delete the bloat and keep only what you need. You can then run the Pingdom Website Speed Test again to see the performance difference.

3. Keep it simple, stupid!

We’ve all heard of the “KISS” acronym before, and it applies to the world of SEO. The problem with many websites is they are often complicated and hard to follow. The layouts may also not adapt well to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

Review the general look and feel of your site. Does it have a simple navigation structure? Is the content easy to read?

One test you could do is to disable JavaScript and CSS in your Web browser. Next, reload your home page. What you see is, in essence, what a search engine like Google will look at. If your site doesn’t make sense at such a basic level, you have a problem!

Often, the simplest solution is to use a different layout or theme for your website. If you use WordPress, for example, it’s easy to select and install a different one for your site.

4. Follow Some Basic SEO Tips

Last, but not least, you need to spend some time making sure you’ve got the SEO basics taken care of on your website! Here are a few SEO tips to help you get started:

• Page Titles – Keep these short but relevant to the page content;
• Meta Description tag – Again, ensure it is relevant and includes your main keyword or phrase;
• Use SEO-friendly URLs – website.com/my-product is easier to understand than website.com/index.php?id=657435&cat=2341234&session=467erdhw352qrwf!

If you desire more info on how to SEO optimize your website, I recommend you download the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. It’s free and contains crucial information to help you improve your site’s SEO.

Indeed, you make 2016 your year as far as your website is concerned when it comes Google SEO. Use these simple tips and you’ll see a whole lot of improvements in your site’s performance.

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Google SEO: How to Give Your Site a Fighting Chance in 2016! was first posted on January 6, 2016 at 11:10 am.
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