Many of us aren’t traveling much these days. We’re staying home and doing puzzles. We’re finding surprising places to walk the dog close to home. We’re fighting Zoom fatigue with funny backgrounds or downloading apps to make ourselves feel like we’re biking through Wales.
We’re contacting old friends and discovering Uncle Bruce was quite the hero in Vietnam.
Our worlds may have shrunk, but we’re finding ways to make those worlds richer.
What does this have to do with ranking factors for SEO?
Well, sometimes it feels like there’s not much new you can do to improve your site or page rankings. Such a limited subject. Been there. Done that. Yawn.
This isn’t true. Try adopting a Zen attitude and look a little closer at the amazing tools in your virtual backyard to find inspiration.
Do you have octopus mojo?
Have you seen the film My Octopus Teacher? It’s a touching work about a surprisingly intelligent octopus in the South African Atlantic Ocean. She is a genius at not getting eaten. She stuffs herself into tiny spaces, disguises herself as other animals and swims at breakneck speed to survive.
This little octopus is the epitome of being both mobile and responsive as your website should be.
First, if a user can’t easily cram your website into small spaces—bring it up on mobile devices—you’re in trouble. You also need to hatch a good plan and design your site to be genuinely responsive. Read our in-depth blog about navigating genuine and imitation responsive web design.
Speed will also help your site to survive in the jaws of the search engines. You can easily mine some additional speed. Just ask yourself a few questions:
- Is each page on my site optimized?
- Are my plugins working correctly?
- Are my images optimized? Do they contain text links?
- Should I run a diagnostic tool for insight?
Do you have a Security Certificate?
Clients navigating the waters of e-commerce want to feel safe. You can help them feel secure by ensuring your site is an HTTPS site with a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. This certificate encrypts the connection between a user’s computer and a website server. An SSL certificate helps a user access your site quickly, enhances safety when a user browses your space publicly, improves Google rankings and helps customers see your site as trustworthy.
Are you authoritative?
In the deep wilds of the web, projecting your strength with well-thought-out connections will enable you to survive and thrive. Perhaps you’ve heard about page authority and domain authority? Both of these can help elevate your website in Google rankings.
You can improve your domain authority by getting lots of good external links connected to your website. Those links will help your site show up more often in search engine lists. You can use this handy tool to check the backlink profile of your site. A good way to cultivate backlinks? Write a regular blog and try writing a guest blog for another site.
Each of your pages, in turn, has page authority. According to SEO marketing authority Moz, the best way to influence your page authority is “to improve its link profile”. This can be accomplished by getting external links from other high-authority pages, which in turn act as “votes of confidence” for the authority of your page.”
Do you take care of your site?
The currents of the web shift often, creating a rough and mutable landscape. This means you can’t create a website and let it sit for years on end without fortifying it, changing it and adapting it to fit the current conditions.
Periodically rewrite or refresh your content to improve your freshness score and website rankings. According to Moz, it is most important to update wide swaths of core parts of your site. Little changes on less important pages might not be as useful.
Do you focus on quality?
To end with the most important ranking factor: Is your content good? Do human beings using your site easily find information that is useful and interesting? Craft content with your end user in mind more than bots crawling the web and you’ll always succeed.
Use headings, shorter paragraphs and links to other sites to help your user access valuable information quickly. Don’t duplicate your content from page to page. Use carefully chosen keywords to attract users, but don’t overuse those words.
Need a hand?
SEO is a science as well as an art. You can shape your website into an agile, swift and powerful tool as well as meet your SEO goals by paying attention to these key ranking factors. If you need help, please contact me online or call me at (720) 443-1407 to schedule your free 30-minute consultation to discuss any questions you might have.
Sublime Creations is an eco-friendly company that specializes in website consultation, design and personalized training catering to local and small businesses, individuals, start-ups, and entrepreneurs.
