SEO Checklist: 6 Amazing Ways to Optimize Your Website

SEO helps you rank higher on search engine results against your target keywords. For instance, if you own a flower shop in New York City, then anyone searching on Google for “florists in NYC” can find their way to your website through proper SEO.

That is why you must look into optimizing your website for higher visibility on search engines. To help you, here are six amazing ways to optimize your website for SEO.

1. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

Given that more and more people use their mobile devices to perform online searches, Google has implemented a policy that indexes a website’s mobile version instead of its desktop pages.

This means that your SEO performance now depends on how mobile-friendly your website is. This is why you must look into optimizing your website’s mobile version. Mostly, the mobile version of your site uses the same text, images, and structure. But it displays seamlessly on mobile devices and their portrait or landscape screen orientation. Thankfully, this optimization is easy to do for professionals. You can get it done by contacting any proficient freelance web designer.

2. Reduce Your Website Load Time

More than half of the mobile visitors instantly leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load as per Google. This means that to keep new visitors on the site, you need to reduce your website load time.

But this also has much to do with your website’s SEO performance. If your website is slow, then it won’t be straightforward for it to rank higher on search results. On the other hand, a faster website has higher chances of capturing top rankings. This is also something that can be done via the help of an experienced web designer. If you use WordPress, then you can also install plugins that help you boost your site’s speed on a consistent basis.

3. Update Your Site with High-Quality Content

Adding engaging, helpful and fresh content to your website pages is key to improving its search engine performance. Having high-quality content tells your visitors that you are there to help them learn about your industry. As a result, it conveys to search engines that you are an excellent resource to refer searchers.

If you’re interested to write about your services, then this is something that you can take care of by yourself. Make sure that you create content that can help your visitors find the information they are looking for. Using relevant keywords through your content in a natural manner also goes a long way. But if you want to focus more on your core business services, then you can also find third-party writers to pull off this task for you.

4. Write Unique Title and Meta Descriptions

While your website’s front-end content can help your SEO, it is not the only content type that needs your attention. Updating your title and meta descriptions at the backend of your website also help improve your site’s visibility.

The key here is to write highly relevant yet descriptive titles and descriptions that tell search engines what your site or its specific pages are. This improves your chances of ranking higher on search results. Engaging titles also help you attract potential visitors’ attention on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Once again, you can do this yourself or hire outside help for it.

5. Optimize Your Images

Yes, you read that correctly. It is not just enough to optimize your content with relevant keywords. But any images on your site also need to be labelled with proper keywords and descriptions.

It’s because unlike humans, search engines cannot read a website. They depend on textual cues to understand a website’s content and structure, which also includes its images. If you optimize your images with proper alt tags and linking structure, then it gives the search engines a full view of your page. Overall, this practice works towards improving your site’s overall rankings on the search engine result pages.

6. Install a Security Certificate

Gone are the days when encryption or site security was limited to websites dealing in financial information. In today’s day and age, security stands front and centre. That’s why it’s no wonder that search engines also prefer those sites to rank higher that have proper security certificates installed on them and use the HTTPS protocol.

To turn your HTTP site to HTTPS, you can quickly obtain a Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate through your hosting provider. This makes your website secure and makes its data exchange to be encrypted. Bear in mind that the security certificate is also widely referred to by the name of its predecessor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), so don’t worry if you see SSL being mentioned instead of TLS when you are on the way to install the certificate. If you have trouble installing it, then you can have a third party developer do it for you.

These tips outline some of the most helpful steps that you can take to boost your site’s SEO performance. But given that SEO is an extensive subject don’t forget to keep reading about the topic and make consistent website optimization a regular practice to get the most of your activities.