3 Simple but Often Forgotten Ways to Optimise Your Website

There is more to building a website than meets the eye. While some businessmen think it’s enough to look visually appealing, Google has its own rules for allocating value to different websites. This means that a nice-looking website may not necessarily rank better than a website Google favours.

Algorithm updates are also unpredictable and the search engine giant hardly discloses detailed information about how they allocate rankings.

If you are quite concerned with the state of your website, there is no need for you to go down the “complex” route. There are simple ways to optimise your website and make it more search engine friendly. You can spend a reasonable amount to ask a team of SEO specialists to help you. If you’re knowledgeable enough, you can also do simple optimising on your own.

1) Optimise your website structure

Each website may require a different style, depending on its target audience or the products/services it sells. Experts recommend following a “strict silo structure” for URLs. Your URL architecture can greatly improve the performance of your website because it would be easier for search engine crawlers to read them.

Some webmasters only focus on optimising the homepage. The silo structure, on one hand, spreads your web authority evenly. This increases your chances of appearing online. Less popular pages – and not just your homepage – will benefit from your more popular and authoritative pages.

The silo structures works best with proper internal linking. Make sure to avoid “orphaned pages” – these are pages neglected during your optimisation efforts because you were too focused on other pages. Uneven authority allocation across pages can make websites rank poorly in organic searches.

2) Fix crawl errors

At specific times each day, search engines crawl your website and its inner pages. However, there are times when crawlers fail to index a site due to poor quality URLs. Now that websites can’t use no-index commands on their Robots.txt files, sites with unnecessary links may experience drastic rankings drop.

Search bots find it difficult to crawl low-quality URLs since values must be assigned to pages for them to rank well on search engine results pages. Webmasters and site owners need to address and monitor link quality issues on a regular basis. Weed out duplicate or sparse links so that crawlers can focus on your high-quality URLs.

Your best course at present is to look for ways to stop your site from generating unnecessarily URLs. Tell your web developer to adopt better and more updated coding methods.

3) Write meta titles and meta descriptions

It’s the new era of SEO – you might argue. Are meta titles and descriptions still relevant?

If anything, meta tag optimisation is old but gold. Adding keywords to your meta descriptions and title tags, though somewhat old school, is basic. Successful SEO campaigns pay attention to this technique because it is still a powerful ranking factor. You will be surprised at how much meta tags can optimise your website rankings in a matter of hours, days or weeks.

Whether you are new to SEO or a long-time expert, underestimating the power of meta descriptions, titles, as well as alt tags, can be fatal. No matter how big or large your campaign is, it’s hard to go wrong with the meta tag optimisation.