Having your site rank on the first page of Google for crucial keywords is something all businesses should aspire to. However, search engine optimisation remains a mystery to many. Some may have been introduced to outdated concepts and may not fully understand what can and cannot affect their rankings. Knowing this alone will help you build more efficient campaigns and avoid crucial errors that could end up hurting your results. Let’s take a look at a few main factors that will affect your visibility with search engines.
Security and Accessibility
The first factor is making sure that your site can be crawled and indexed in the first place. This means that your site needs to be accessible and well organised. You will need a robot.txt file to direct Google’s bots towards the right areas of your website. You also need to make sure that you’re using the right builder for the site and have a sitemap. If you’re using WordPress, a tool like Yoast will allow you to create a sitemap in seconds.
Also, you have to make sure that your site’s semantics are on point. If you don’t have much experience, that might be difficult to tell on your own. But a team like Vudu might be able to help. They will also help improve things like navigation and fix sticking points with your site’s design and structure.
Last, you want to make sure that you switch to HTTPS. Google’s John Mueller stated that it was a ranking factor, so that’s a sure-fire way to improve your results immediately.
Site Speed
How fast your site loads is also a ranking factor for search engines. If your site is underperforming, you will not only end up infuriating visitors but lose visibility as well. And it all starts with fast and reliable hosting.
If you’re running a WordPress site, we suggest you check out https://vududigital.co.uk/. You will learn about the different hosting options for WordPress sites and see which ones would be the best for you.
There are other things that you can do to improve site loading speeds. One of them is to keep things as simple as possible. Something like a Jquery carousel might look nice but will affect performance negatively. You also have to make sure that your images are as lightweight as possible. That means forgetting formats like PNG and look for lighter ones such as JPEG or WebP, which was made specifically for speed. You can also use image compression.
Mobile Friendliness
This one is very important. Google switched to a mobile-first index not too long ago. This means that your mobile site will be the one that is used primarily to rank your site. This also means that you should consider moving to a responsive website immediately if you haven’t already.
These are three of the most important factors that will dictate how well you perform on search engines. If that’s important to you and you would love to get additional attention, we suggest you work on these and keep researching how you can improve.
