Improve Your Website’s SEO

Much has been written about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the ‘science’ that helps us improve the position of our website in search engine results. And if that much has been written is just because nobody really knows what exactly do search engines take into account to position websites, nor to what extent. 

If this was not enough, some search engines, specially Google, are determined to change every few minutes the algorithm used to provide the search results. Although they do it for a good cause, to prevent people from ‘cheating’, they still have driven mad more than one SEO manager.

There is good news, though! Those SEO managers that escaped the madness in every algorithm change have testes and continuously make research to know how to maintain websites optimized for search engines. And what's better, they share it with the world! So if you want to optimize your website’s SEO and appear in the top search engine results, just keep reading!

The elements that need to be taken in account to improve your SEO can be divided in three main areas:

1. The website

SEO starts when we start designing the website, and there are several things we need to pay attention to:

• Site map. This is the website’s structure, the way the different pages are organised. If this structure is logical, allowing users to easily navigate without getting lost, they will not only stay for longer on the web, search engines will also give your site a higher rank position.
• Web responsive. What we mean when we say that a website is web responsive is that its design adapts to different devices (computers, smartphones and tablets). Sure you have seen many websites on your smartphone that are too small or entirely out of position, and it makes it even harder to read on a screen that is not too large (although they are getting bigger!). This does not only annoys users, it annoys search engines too and they penalize it more and more. Remember that 2014 was the first year with more searches made from smartphones than form computers.
• The URL of the website and of its different pages. If the website’s URL has the brand’s name, search engines will appreciate it. But what is most important is the URL of its different pages, which should describe each page if they want search engines to boost them to the top rank results. For example, when talking about my blog, I named it Lunática Ana, so its URL ishttps://lunaticaanacm.wordpress.com/ (it contains the brand name), and for each page there is a descriptive URL, such ashttps://lunaticaanacm.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/optimiza-el-seo-de-tu-pagina-web) (for this article in Spanish).
• The loading speed of the website. Just like the rest of these elements, it bothers users when done wrongly, so search engines take this into account when delivering results. Your website should not take more than three seconds to load.
• Dropout rate. If users come to your website but do not interact in it, that is, do not comment, or click on any link before leaving, search engines will interpret that the content is not interesting. Algorithms generally also consider how long users spend on the website to assess this. To avoid a high drop out rate it is necessary to provide quality content, and you would better do it in a way search engines will rate it. To do this, simply follow to the next area.

 2. The website’s content

Once the website has been built, we have to work on its content, which must be engaging and interesting (the more it is read the better ranked). As mentioned before, you have to deliver quality content, but to improve SEO you must also meet, as far as possible, the following features:

• Constantly renew the website’s content. Creating a website and not working on it for the next 12 months will do no good, you have to add content regularly. When adding content, remember that the content must meet a number of features, but it must make sense too. If you repeat the keyword in each phrase, the user will feel cheated and search engines will penalize you.
• Use a catchy title that invites users to read, and that contains the keyword for which you want to be finded.
• Publish large content. Long texts are better valued, although search engines analyse only the first 150 words, so you should concentrate keywords in this space. In addition, search engines value texts without spelling and grammatical errors.
• Visual elements. These are images, pictures and videos. They make reading easier, which means that search engines appreciate it, and they also increase the time that users stay on the website, which, as I mentioned, also improves SEO. Remember to describe these elements in the space allotted for it, you can add keywords there too!
• Emphasize local. One of Google’s latest algorithms, Pigeon, made it clear that this search engine prioritises local content, as it makes content results that are physically closer appear ahead of the rest. Maps can help you tell Google where your content belongs. Of course, use them only if it makes sense.

 3. Other elements

• Promote your community. Search engines have increasingly into account comments on blogs and social networking activity, so you should boost your community's participation.
• Links from other pages. This is something that search engines have always valued highly, but the times in which you could pay 'link farms' to make them add links to your website are over. Now you need to create relationships to get those links, because they must be quality links.
• CTR. This stands for 'Click Through Rate, which is the percentage of clicks your website gets among every time it is shown as a result in the search engine. The higher the percentage, the better for SEO. To achieve a high CTR it is important to remember what we said about the title and to write an attractive and descriptive first paragraph too.