With competition ever growing between businesses online and plenty of blogs competing for views and followers, it’s not uncommon to wonder if you’ve done all that you can to optimize your website in order to realize its full potential. 

By taking a good look at your website and it’s content, you’ll likely notice many ways in which you can improve it. By frequently reviewing your website and optimizing its performance and SEO, you’ll likely notice an uptick in views, conversions, and sales! 

To help you get the most out of your website, read on for some simple tips to optimize any website: 

1. Do Your Keyword Research: 

Although it would be nice, it really isn’t possible for your site to rank highly for every keyword you use. There is too much competition out there! If you are building a new website, it is important that you do keyword research properly in order to select the best keywords. You must select keywords that’ll drive traffic to your site, but have just the right amount of competition. 

Since Google’s recent release of the Hummingbird update, SEO has shifted from its focus on individual keywords to topics. This update puts the focus more on what the intent of the phrase is and has a better understanding of what it means in context to the rest of the content on a site. This allows for Google and other search engines to provide links to pages that haven’t purposefully been optimized for the given search term. 

The Google Adwords tool is still useful for giving some suggestions for keywords and should be used as a part of your keyword research. The keywords you choose should have a medium to low level of competition in its niche. If this at all sounds intimidating to you, hiring out an SEO agency for the task will likely net you some great results! 

2. Improve Page Load Times: 

Since Google started adding page load speeds to their search algorithm, sites that loaded up slowly saw a noticeable drop in traffic driven by Google. Google is now taking page load speed into account when ranking websites. 

In order to keep page load times down, minimize the file size of media such as pictures and video and try to limit the number of plugins your site runs to a minimum. 

When making changes to your site and adding functionality, it’s good practice to check the page load times immediately following the change to see if they’ve been affected. 

3. Provide Quality Content: 

In order for your site to rank well with Google, you need to provide quality content to viewers. Search engines such as Google rank websites with spelling errors and bad grammar lower than more polished sites. Sites that take the time to produce well-written and structured content benefit from higher rankings, deservedly so. 

It’s common to wonder how long content such as a blog post should be. While there is no steadfast rule, a good suggested minimum is 500 words for a blog post. 

Longer posts with over 1000 words tend to rank better according to research. Google prefers these so-called authoritative posts with 2000 or more words so it’s a good idea to include some on your site. 

In 2013, Google introduced in-depth articles as a new category of search result. Google places these in-depth articles separately in a special box to the right of the normal search results, grouped with other more authoritative content on the given search term. 

Conclusion

Taking the time to optimize your website on occasion will net you some real results with time. By doing your keyword research early, you can save a lot of time and effort later on. Building quality content around these keywords and phrases will net you higher ranking with Google and will make your website more appealing to visitors.