We are in the final stretch of 2017, 2018 is almost here! While you go about making New Year resolutions, you might also want to ensure that your website is SEO ready for the coming year. Above everything is we all want our businesses to be on the front line that includes the business website.
It is important always to make sure that your website is rightly representing your business or brand. Over the years the web has evolved at warp speed, it continues to grow every day. You should not be left behind. Here are some of the tips to make sure that your website is SEO ready for 2018:
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Make Sure Your Images Have a Purpose
Most websites add images to their blog posts as an afterthought. Most businesses put so much focus on the words that go into their sites as a means of making them SEO friendly; they pay less attention to the images they put out.
With so many social media platforms at the moment, the web has become a highly visual platforms, so leverage that! You should make sure that you choose the pictures you want to include correctly. Make sure the image can make an instant emotional connection with your niche.
Images are powerful tools, and that’s the first thing your readers and visitors see. This means that if you leverage the opportunity wisely, you can use the images to tell your audience what your brand is and what you’re all about.
If you keep reusing the same photos you have used before, then you will tell your audience that you are no different than most businesses out there. Make the Images SEO as well, make sure that the alt txt section of the picture has a keyword. Make sure that you use authentic and unique images that will wisely and monetarily represent your business. You should also ensure that the photos are not too large.
Make your images between 30 to 100kb and wit a resolution of around 720dpi. If you use images that are too large, you will make your site load slowly which will in return affect your search engine ranking negatively.
The images will allow you to convey your voice in 2018 without even using your words. Images can be more useful than the actual texts because they help control the emotions your website will generate and humanize your brand. So make sure that your images have a purpose and are relevant to your site if you want to make it SEO ready and improve your site’s ranking.
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Incorporate Video More
As we said, it the web is a highly visual platform. Therefore, if the images are worth more than words, image the value of the video. Your website visitors will be more likely to watch videos on the site rather than read through the blog posts.
This age has time and again proven to have very short attention spans; they prefer the most entertaining and fastest way to get the information they require. One way to ensure this is through video. If you haven’t already incorporated video into your SEO strategy, make it your New Year resolution.
If you want to engage your website visitors in 2018, you need to make sure that you use video. It’s the most efficient and most natural way. The video will also allow you to forge an emotional and authentic connection with your readers and potential audience.
Search engines also really like the video so it will not only attract more visitors to your site but also make your website SEO ready. The video will help your site rank even higher because you will increase a number of time visitors spend on your website. You will also have more engagements, higher click-through, and better conversion rates.
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Focus on Ways to Convert
Making sure your website looks good and draws substantial attention is not enough! In most cases, making conversions seem quite easy, but most business and brands tend to forget to offer their audience ways to register or even request more information. It can be so easy to forget to seal the deal.
If you want to make your site SEO ready come to the New Year, you have to make sure that your site has compelling graphics and strong headlines. Make sure you incorporate graphics callouts like circles, arrows, boxes or pull quotes. You should also fix sticky banner callouts either at the top or bottom of your page. Make sure they highlight the precise content or direct your audience’s focus where you prefer it.
The contact form is also a top way to convert visitors if you haven’t added one make sure you do. Make the contact form short, simple, and bearing the same outlook as your site.
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Place the Keywords in Many Different Areas
Most businesses focus on adding keywords to their blog posts only and tend to neglect all the other areas. Keywords can be used in more areas not just in your articles. You can do this by adding your focus keyword into the tags your videos and images.
You should also use your keywords in
- H1 tags
- title tags
- meta descriptions
- website slogans
- meta keywords
- H2 tags
- navigation
- title attribute on links
- bullet points
- breadcrumb trails
- H3 tags
- URL’s
- footer links
- internal links
- file names and folder names.
Read our article SEO advice that actually makes a difference for some more tips on using keywords more effectively.
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Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
If your site hasn’t been readily accessible this year, it is time to change that. You need to make sure that your website is optimized to perform on mobile devices. In this day and age, people are more and more engrossed in their smartphones and tablets.
Most of the internet traffic is a result mobile traffic. There is a very high like a hood that most of your visitors access your website via their mobile devices. That being said, always make sure you optimize your website for mobile!
Google also prioritizes on websites that are mobile-friendly in their search results. Google gave brands the opportunity to make their sites Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP is meant to allow your page to load quickly and fast on the mobile devices. This will give your visitors a great experience and push your site to rank high in Google search rankings to make your site SEO ready.
If you make sure, your site has a responsive design in 2018 you will make your site easy and fast to load, with high-speed navigation and make it mobile-compatible hence easy to use. In any case, no matter how your audience gets to your site, it should always look great.
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Make you URLs User-Friendly
If you want your website to rank, then you need to make sure that the website’s URLs are SEO friendly. Make sure that the site’s URL helps the search engines to know and determine what your brand is all about.
You should also limit the categories on the link you use. Also make sure that the words in the URL are separate, use hyphens to separate them. Avoid using underscores. URLs help people find your site’s particular page and also helps them recall the page URL, so you also need to make sure that it is short and easy to remember.
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Use Micro Animations to Make the Website More Interesting
Use micro animations, as long as they are purposeful, to make your site attractive to your audience and visitors. If they are designed tastefully and strategically used, they can make a big impact.
The animations make the time your audience spends on your website more engaging. However, to make the site SEO ready in 2018 make sure you use the micro animations incorporated into your web design are minimal. If you overdo it with unnecessary whistles and bells, you will chase the user away instead of on enriching them.
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Consider Using Voice Search
With tools like Cortana and Siri, tools based on voice recognition continue to grow. Not only is voice search less frustrating it is also more convenient which makes it growth rate really high. Google even reported that about 20% of mobile queries are made through the voice search.
Compared to text-based queries, voice search queries are more specific and more prolonged and give immediate solutions. To make your site SEO ready in 2018, you need to make sure that you optimize and shift for voice search.
You can do that by incorporating long-tail keywords to address your users’ queries. Make sure that you answer the where, when, what and how questions with more a more conversational tone and natural language.
You can also include questions that are frequently asked on an FAQ page and offer clear comprehensive answers. Make sure you understand your users need so that you can readily provide the right solutions. Chances are most of the voice searches will be local so take good care of your local SEO.
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Spend YOUR Crawl Data Wisely
In 2016, Google shed light on the crawl budget topic. Crawl budget is meant to make your website more appealing and enticing to the search engines. The crawl budget tends to overlap with SEO because it is concerned with all the important pages that are being indexed, crawled and updated at the right time.
To make your Site SEO ready you have to make sure that you don’t waste any of the crawl budgets! Your goal is to make Google crawl to your site frequently. A crawl budget will help you build some reputable links for your website.
It will also ensure that the relevant pages are crawlable for important search engines spiders. It will also block pages that refuse to show up in the SERPS. Since some spiders tend to give up before reaching the end destination, the crawl budget makes sure that there will be no unnecessary redirect chains.
Instead of waiting for the budget on 4xx pages your will be able to get rid of the broken links. You will also be able to optimize the slow and cumbersome pages and end up benefiting on all levels available. The budget will allow you to keep your sitemap tidy, garbage-free and up-to-date. Which in turn enables search engines to get your website’s structure and find fresh content faster.
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Security
Some sites are HTTP while others are HTTPS. Wondering what the significance of the S is? Security! This is because the websites that are HTTPS have the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) feature that helps encrypt the information exchanges between the web server and browser. The feature protects your website’s audience from any hacker who might intend to steal their private information like a password and credit card number.
Google also seeks to offer their users with the best experience. Meaning that it favors a site that has the feature in their search results. This makes sure that any information their user’s exchange is safe. In the near future, sites without the SSL features will be labeled as insecure. Therefore, make this a priority for the New Year. Make your website safe by including the SSL feature.
Most important thing to make sure your website is SEO friendly for 2018 is making sure that your site is entirely and easily accessible. This will help you make sure that your conversation rates are up to par and that you’re ranking in the search engines.
In the end, the above tips will only work if your website is view-able in all the browsers. The aim is to make visitors want to use your services or purchase your products in 2018. This will be difficult if your site is hard to navigate or loads slowly. So make sure that you don’t use images and videos that will make the site load slowly.