How to optimize SEO for your visitors

Take your time to keywords

Keywords are your way of telling people what your site is about, so they’re significant. The best keywords, though, are ones that make sense when you read them. There are keyword tools all over the internet that can help with keyword research and figure out how many searches a word or phrase gets. Make sure your site is optimized for visitors—not search engines. Search engines will only find it if they think a human would be interested in it! For example, an optometrist may want to call their page about contact lenses — Contact Lenses: How to choose and care for them. Rather than something like — Contact lenses cheap as free shipping in the USA. That one might seem like a good option but try reading that out loud. Some bloggers have had success with longer titles because they perform better on social media sites (like Facebook). Do some testing!

But remember, don’t sacrifice usability just to get more traffic through SEO. Above all else: if it doesn’t work well on a computer, assume it won’t do well on mobile either. There’s not much time left before someone considers leaving Google altogether. No business wants to lose out on potential customers due to poor optimization; everyone needs exposure these days. If you’re feeling at a loss for where to start, there are ways you can analyze and fix your existing site. The most obvious solution involves seeing what keywords readers use when looking for similar pages.

Make sure you have a mobile version of your site

A huge percentage of internet users have access to content from mobile devices. If your business doesn’t have a good mobile version of its site, it’s probably missing out on potential traffic. Make sure you have a website optimized for all devices, including smartphones and tablets. An easy way to test if your site is mobile-friendly is by trying it on your phone! Or you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Some other websites let you check whether your URL is mobile-friendly or not. These services also offer suggestions on optimizing your site for a better ranking in search results. The most popular ones include:

• Google,
• Bing,
• Yandex.

Use these sites in conjunction to ensure you have complete coverage across multiple browsers and OSes. Think about where your target audience is located when optimizing your site. Research shows that people use different search engines depending on their country or language.

For example, Google Search was more popular than Yandex in Russia, while Bing was more widely used than Google Search in Germany in 2013 ( but Yandex overtook Bing as #1 earlier in 2015 ). When optimizing an English-language web page, you should focus more effort on Bing and Google results than Yandex and Baidu.

Create an XML sitemap for your website

XML sitemaps make it easier for search engines like Google and Bing to crawl your site, index your content, and rank you in search results. An XML sitemap is a file that’s similar to an HTML sitemap but uses XML (Extensible Markup Language) syntax instead of HTML. You can’t submit an XML sitemap directly from Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools).

However, you can easily upload an XML sitemap file to Search Console so that it can help crawlers find pages on your site more easily. If you have thousands of web pages, managing all those URLs can be difficult. If that’s the case, we recommend including just one page per file. But if you have only one or two pages, there’s no reason not to include them all! Keep each URL on its own line in your sitemap files—search engines can handle it! Generally speaking, multi-page sites should include separate files for separate sections—one sitemap per section with each URL contained within its own file. This will make updating links easier when sections are moved around or rearranged.

Do keyword research

Keywords are words or phrases that potential customers type into search engines when they’re looking for something to buy. Use keywords in your content—in your titles, headlines, and descriptions—to make sure that people who are searching for something relevant will be able to find you. Of course, overuse of any keyword will make your page less appealing overall, so just try and strike a balance.

Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content is a scourge on your site and can cause Google to penalize you. If you publish duplicate content across multiple pages, Google will rank only one of those pages, counting all of them as duplicates. To keep your rankings high, avoid publishing identical or near-identical content in more than one place. This is especially important on your home page; if you have an About Us section on both your home page and subpage, Google may choose to rank only one of those pages.

The same goes for any footer content — Google may strip out duplicate footer information from every page on your site and only use one version. Make sure that there’s no duplicate content anywhere on your site by using tools like Copyscape to make sure you’re not accidentally stealing someone else’s work.