All of us want our web pages to rank well, and often times we think that just posting a wealth of great content ought to do the trick, but we’re here to tell you that there is a little more to the recipe than simply adding words and images.
Google loves to reward pages that are technically well done with high rankings, as they feel as though while you may have great content, if your user experience is less than wonderful, they’ll say no thank you and look elsewhere.
Let’s take a peek at a 5 ways you can better optimize your pages to be more Google-friendly.
5 Ways to optimize your web pages technically
Page speed – You might have heard the latest human attention span statistic; that we now are transfixed a mere 8 seconds, one second less than a Goldfish. Therefore it should not be a surprise that Google probably will not rank your site well if it loads slowly, as people will see this as a poor user experience, or maybe not go there at all!
Internal links – Google likes to see a good internal linking plan, one that provides users with useful links to relevant pages inside and outside of the site. This also plays a role in passing Pagerank. Also, don’t make the mistake of having multiple navigation menus. Use one, as well as a sitemap and a link back to your home page from each page.
Make sure you are Schema compliant – Schema.org is the web language markup that Google, Yahoo and Bing have agreed to use in order to better see what your pages are about. This is one you’ll need a webmaster for.
Use HTML elements – A major part of how your page will be ranked is determined by the use of certain HTML elements that indicate what your content is about. This includes the use of H1-H4 tags, meta data and image optimization, to name a few.
Proper use of keywords – Utilizing your keywords throughout your page in the places Google wants to see them such as in title tags, page URLs, post and page titles along with other tags and textual content should go a long way toward helping you rank for your chosen phrases.
