Improve your SEO
As we know SEO is the key to ranking your website higher on search engines. It would be great if we could just throw up a website and all of a sudden be number one rank on any search. But my friends there are thousands of other people, SEO agencies and companies all vying for higher rankings. This post is going to quickly touch on basic key SEO ranking initiatives( how to improve your SEO) that Spark Digital uses itself and for ranking our clients. They are basic and will achieve quick results. In further blog posts I will dive into many more advanced aspects of ranking higher on google and other search engines.
Your Pages are not Indexing on Google
Of course, there are other search engines beside Google but I use Google as my go to ranking engine in 2021. When Google crawls a website, a software process where every 3 to 4 days according to Google they investigate content on website pages and this information is reported back and indexed, it will affect how pages come up in rank. Let’s not talk about content right now, we are just addressing the issue of indexing. Content is very important to rank and we will get there another time. Basically, if a websites pages do not index there is no way for google to determine if the page has relevant information for searches on those topics. The basic premise behind higher Google ranking is to provide the most relevant information on a search as they can provide. So what to do?
Google provides many free webmaster tools, called Google search console is a free tool offering many benefits, one being to check your website to see if there are pages that are not indexing.
To sign up for Goolge search console and follow these steps.
- Go to Google Search Console.
- Navigate to the URL inspection tool.
- Paste the URL you’d like Google to index into the search bar.
- Wait for Google to check the URL.
- Click the “Request indexing” button
I will cover in depth page indexing all by itself in a later blog.
404 Redirect or Error
The 404 Error, what is that? This has to do with page indexing and Domain Authority rating. Domain Authority rating is a search engine ranking score that gives a measure of how successful a site is when it comes to search engine results. Domain Authority is based on a scoring system from 1-100 with a good score below 50 and not so good above 50. This comparable to a friend or colleague giving out a recommendation
The HTTP 404, 404 not found, 404, 404 error, page not found or file not found error message is a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) standard response code, in computer network communications, to indicate that the browser was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested.
There could be several reasons for this but some of the main ones include and old page that might have been migrated to a new site, a new page that has not been redirected to main domain properly among several others. Once again Google search console is a great free tool for this. If you can not fix the 404 error contact your web development company or feel free to give Spark Digital a call or email any requests you might have.
Duplicate Content
Yes content will be a recurring theme throughout SEO topic posts because in 2022 content is king. Just like your favorite streaming network like Netflix or Amazon puts out new content for its viewers all the time, having amazing, high quality and searchable content on a website is just as important. For this post once again, I am not going to dive too deep into what makes great content, as far as the search crawlers are concerned but just what will hurt your ranking and that’s duplicate content.
Duplicate content confuses Google and forces Google crawlers to pick between to pages. Maybe you had a old page blog and replaced it with a new one that is much more keyword oriented. The crawler doesn’t know and most of the time picks the wrong one. Not something we want to see
Websites that are not Mobile Friendly
Search engine algorithms are always changing and it’s hard to keep up with them even for pros like me. There has been a consistent trend to incorporate the quality of mobile usability a site has into the ranking equation. It certainly makes sense in today’s world where mobile is a huge part of searches.It makes sense especially in the world we are living in where mobile is a huge part of searches.
Google takes this into account when checking websites for Domain Authority. As I mentioned earlier high Domain Authority tells Google these guys are ok and to let their content come up on searches when most relevant. This is another way to improve your seo.
Website Load Speeds
Website load speeds both for desktop and mobile play a big part in how crawlers rate your website. This is a well-known fact. Page speed is a direct factor especially since Google’s Algorithm Speed Update. Additionally, speed can also affect rankings indirectly by increasing bounce rate and reducing dwell time. Since we are brushing over the basics here 3 good tips about load speed. Quicker load speeds will improve your seo.
How Fast is fast? It’s pretty basic a good website load speed is 3 seconds or less. It’s not exactly known how Google calculates this and just remember, it’s all about web speed load time. This is the most important factor versus load speed score which is not as important. After 3 seconds people leave.
If people leave your site, then this will affect your bounce rate. Bounce rate of course is a big part of the Google rating algo also. So the lower the bounce rate the better the better your Domain Authority.
Remember both desktop and Mobile come into play in speed load rating if you site is not configured for mobile Google with not look upon that favorably and your content will not come up in searches.
Well thanks for the read of how to improve your seo and watch out for great SEO tips from Spark Digital. If you have any questions, want a quote for our SEO services or have a idea you want to bounce off us. Please feel to reach out 516-509-7055 or on Instagram @gosparkdigtal .