“I optimized my website and did the best I could, but I could not find that one robust tactic that gives me a high return on investment.”
SEO is always evolving. While some strategies in the past have proved to be profitable, they may not be as effective today. However, there are still some optimization strategies and tactics that are still important today and should not be ignored.
Here are the four simple things to help your overall SEO results:
1. Revise Low-Traffic/Low Quality Pages
Depending on how large your site is, there is a limit on pages crawled by search engines. The main target should be to let search engines crawl the most valuable/quality pages of your website. Pages that have low quality or low traffic should be removed to let search engines crawl the most important pages.
To do this, check if your site has following things:
– Pages that are old and are no longer relevant to your business
– Blog posts that are outdated
– Pages with thin content (pages will less content or having little or no original content)
– Multiple pages that can be merged and grouped under a single theme or topic
– Pages that mostly contain low search volume keywords
Keeping all such pages aside will pave a way for search engines to reach your higher-quality pages and are likely to appear on search results, thereby improving the overall quality of your website.
However, be careful when removing those pages because you could lose link equity and website authority you have built. It is recommended to set up a permanent 301 redirect to ensure search engines and users are sent to the most relevant pages.
2. Optimize URL Architecture and Structure
URL architecture and its structure plays a significant role in modern website optimization. A wise approach in URL structure revision and optimization is to get rid of URL structure and set a hierarchy instead. A hierarchical URL architecture allows search engines to better understand what your website content is about.
One simple way to do this is to create nested buckets under each of the individual pages within your website. Your home page will have the largest bucket since it is about the core theme of your content. Then, there will be second level-pages, under which you will create third level pages or blog posts that are related to the second level pages. When you create deeper page levels, make sure they all fit within the same theme as the second level page.
In the same way, other second level pages should follow the same hierarchy bucketing as all related content under it. The benefit of this is creating a meaningful flow of your website content, not just throwing your various website topics randomly. Such URL folder structure allows link equity passed on to the main themes under each hierarchy and improve the authority. Search engines will weigh the content groups and are likely to churn better ranking positions.
3. Improve Page Load Time
Page speed is another simple SEO effort yet often discarded. The fact that page speed is a ranking factor denotes how important it for website optimization.
You can check your website speed using Google’s speed test tools such as PageSpeed Insights and Test my site which will bring out your website speed status and areas that need improvement.
To boost website speed, use a reputable web host that can give you secure hosting and offers overall page speed improvement. You may also want to check on the number of plugins you have and reduce them because each plugin requires processing effort for each page to load. The same approach applies to CSS, JavaScript, images, and videos.
4. Optimize Internal Linking Structure
This is another area most people overlook in their optimization strategy. Internal links can add valuable SEO benefits when done correctly and are important due to technical and user experience.
Internal links help search engines discover more pages that are important and relevant to the page it crawled. They also help improve user experience as it helps users find more related content they are looking for.
Building an internal linking structure is simple but should be done by taking into account technical and user experience impacts. Avoid too many internal links as it may confuse search engine crawlers with numerous content and distract users.
Remember to include internal links from any relevant pages to all your important pages – solutions, products, or services. In the linking text, try to use keywords related to the page you want to link to. This will ensure optimization of relevant keywords while improving internal linking structure. At the same time, check all the internal links to make sure they are only relevant links and that there are no crawl errors.
There are many other simple SEO tactics that can be easily employed to improve rankings and traffic and these are few of them. If you are looking for deeper optimization tips, here is what you can look up to: 4 Tips to Take Your SEO Effort to the Next Level
