There are over a billion websites in existence on the internet. So it does not stop at simply making the page accessible to the public.
Your target audience and customers need to be able to find your website with ease, and immediately see the content and information they are looking for!
Otherwise, you will quickly lose their attention and miss valuable opportunities to make sales or simply grow connections with your site visitors.
To help you weave through today’s web intricacies and drive the traffic you aim for, here are the top 5 things your website needs to have:
1. WELL-WRITTEN META TAGS
In the most basic sense, Meta Tags refer to the text which describes and summarises the information found on web pages. When your page link is shared on social media platforms, these are what appear to viewers and lead them to click on, should the topic interest them.
But more than that, this information is also consumed by internet bots called web crawlers. These work to tell search engines such as Google what your page is all about, ultimately leading organic visitors your way, who most likely turn into potential customers.
If you find it tricky or time-consuming to write your meta tags, here is a cool website where you can preview and generate them easily: https://metatags.io/
2. FAST SPEED
This is the most important thing to consider in the user experience category. Simply put, visitors will not wait patiently to view your website. It needs to load in under 3 seconds and must run smoothly the entire time!
A lot of factors affect website speed such as the site of the page document, images, hosting, and even server location.
Today, search engines collect these web vitals to rank your website on their search results page. To find out more on how this works with Google, read more about page experience (UX) here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/experience/page-experience
If you need help with speeding up your website or just a general website audit, you can contact us at https://xdnainteractive.com.
3. GREAT CONTENT + CLEAR CALL TO ACTION + COMPLETE INTERNAL LINKING
Content
Updating regularly with fresh content will help keep your website relevant and interesting. The more you have to share, the better. In turn, search engines will index your pages and increase the chances of coming up on search results. But of course, make sure to only include helpful and useful information!
Call to Action
What is the purpose of your site? Are you mainly selling something, offering memberships, or promoting a service? There must be a clear call-to-action displayed on a conspicuous section of your page, which prompts or compels an immediate response from your website visitors.
Internal Linking
Using websites can be confusing for some. Inter-linking your website pages will work wonders to help visitors navigate through your website with ease. Search engines crawlers follow these links too. These will also speed up and improve the chances of your page being indexed!
4. A COMPLETE SITEMAP
Providing your website sitemap to Google will help improve overall discoverability in results. These contain all the information and specific types of files found on your website. They feed search engines everything found on your website’s different pages – text, images, video, and more.
Here’s a link on how to build and submit a sitemap to Google: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/sitemaps/overview
5. GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Ranking better on search engines is no easy task. It undoubtedly takes time and continuous effort. But how do we know if we are going on the right track? We measure our success by analyzing the data coming from our website.
Although there are many other providers, 94% of web searches happen on Google. Using Google Analytics will allow you significantly more and better data to interpret.
Google Analytics captures and records everything – demographics, where your visitors are from, and exactly what they clicked on the website. Compiling and studying these data will help you determine how to best push your product or services each time.
It is important to keep in mind that ranking on search engines does not simply happen overnight. Helping your website reach such heights will require a lot of patience, learning and hard work. However, you can always do this at your own pace.
Focusing on the 5 items above and updating constantly will improve your online visibility organically to set your website up for success in the long run. And over time, after you have produced quality and shareable content with fantastic loadings speeds, other website or app owners may recognize this and create outbound links to your website. With a little help from like-minded strangers, you can enjoy the benefits of one of the strongest functionalities of the Google algorithm.
So always prioritise quality over quantity, and your website will slowly but surely flourish for years to come!
