3 Simple Website SEO Resolutions
Happy New Year! 'Tis that time of year when we set out to develop new habits in an effort to make this year the best one yet. Alongside diet, health, and wellness goals - business goals also enter the list of New Year’s resolutions made. Whether it’s finding ways to be more productive, and more efficient, increase sales or get more traffic to your website – making a conscious effort to better your business is the first step. The next part is getting down to the doing. In an effort to help improve your online marketing this year, we are listing 3 simple SEO resolutions that you can make to improve your website today:
Duplicate content is an SEO no-no that results in lower rankings and less traffic coming to your website. When the same content appears in multiple places across the internet, search engines have a difficult time deciding which version is the original, the best, or the most relevant. As a result, search engines don’t know which version to include in their index and which version to rank when a given query is made.
Avoid duplicate content appearing on your website by not plagiarizing someone else’s copy to begin with. Copying and pasting something from your competitor's website won’t do you any favours when it comes to ranking better in search engines. By all means, take a cue from them and gain inspiration for the verbiage you’d like on your own site but don’t just steal it and think that search engines won’t notice.
Also, with respect to pages on your website where the content is 90% or more the same as another page on your site, reconsider your information architecture and consolidate information where relevant. Rather than having several pages containing similar information, create a single page that comprehensively covers the topic – using anchor text to help your web visitors navigate easily further down the page.
Despite how smart search engines are, they still lack our ability as humans to see images and watch videos hence, the importance of adding ALT image attributes. These alt image tags let you provide a description for the contents of the image file so search engines can “see” your image and index it accordingly. By adding alt-image attributes to your website’s images, you also increase your chances of showing up and ranking in image search results. Review the images on your website to see if ALT img tags are missing, and fill in the info. Be sure to include keywords that are relevant to the image and the content on the webpage where the image appears.
Broken links most definitely frustrate web visitors, and they also negatively affect your website’s search engine rankings. Given that Google’s goal is to provide the most useful and relevant results the internet has to offer, in addition to a seamless user experience when a query is made, if it returns a link that does not work and this is discovered, they will be quite upset. Google has publicly stated in their Webmaster Guidelines that broken links should be something you look out for and fix immediately. And, while being on Google’s good side matters immensely for SEO purposes, you always want to put your web visitors' user experience first. If you say that a link is going to go somewhere, it should go to the correct webpage that it references.
Make this year, the best one yet for you and your business by getting your website’s SEO efforts on track with the aforementioned tips. We are always writing about ways you can improve your web design, UX design and SEO techniques - so do be sure to check back on our blog. Happy New Year, and we wish you the very best for the months to come!
