What About Your Website Is Preventing Effective SEO

What About Your Website Is Preventing Effective SEO

April 18, 2018

Most websites now are doing an “okay” job at effectively incorporating SEO. Search engine optimization can be extremely helpful when it comes to driving traffic to a website. However, some companies and businesses do not know how to increase their SEO rating. Here are a couple of things that could be preventing effective SEO for a website.

Content is Not Relevant

The amount of time people spend on a website, “dwell time”, is important in determining an SEO rating. When there is not enough interesting or useful information on the site, most people will not want to stay very long. People come to a site for certain reasons, whether it is a blog article they found or to look for a company in a specific field of work. Make sure to always have recent and up to date relevant information in order to elongate the average attention span. This could be news articles, blog posts, funny videos, etc.

Page Load Speed

When being ranked by a search engine, load time is largely taken into consideration. There are many ways to shorten load speed times. One way is to consistently optimize the images on the website. If there are a bunch of photos on a website, but their size is too big, it will take the page longer to load. Get a plugin that automatically optimizes the photos, making the file size smaller, but not altering their appearance on a website. Another way is to use caching plugins to make sure that the site code is clean and streamlined.

Outbound Links

Not using enough outbound links will definitely factor in. Try linking out to more known websites and/or more informational websites. When linking to a well-respected website, it gives your content more relevance and also sends search engines certain trust signals. Be careful though, too many outbound links can look visually unpleasing to the eye and appear a bit overwhelming.

Broken Links

This is a huge no no. It is the worst when clicking on a link and getting sent to a page that does not work anymore. It is tough to keep track of, but there are plugins that help weed out those links. Broken links also make the website seem like it is old, out of date and/or neglected. Sites with too many of these broken links get ranked much lower, so check before linking to other pages.

Readability

We have all run into those article that makes us feel like we need a dictionary next to us. No one wants to google every other word in an article to understand what it’s about! Make content easily understandable and improve the readability of the website. This will keep the “dwell time” up and also help the website move up in the rankings.

These are only a few things that could be preventing a website from getting a higher SEO ranking. Try fixing a couple of these issues and see how the rankings improve!

Click here to schedule a Complimentary Brand Consultation.