How To Improve SEO of your Website in 5 Steps
One of the ways to publish and distribute your website is to use Search Engine Optimization for Search Engines to show your site to users.
Making SEO involves a combination of technical and content optimization.
When SEO is set up and used correctly – it could bring lots of new traffic to the web page. It is not complex to accomplish, while optimizing your website could play important part in boosting your search presence.
Google receives 90% of all online searches. That’s why we’re going to talk about setting up SEO for Googling and connect to Google Search Console for detailed analysis.
Inside of Google’s Search Engine
Google uses crawl bots, we are going to talk more about which technologies improve how good your page is for crawlers later on.
This picture from Google is going to help us understand the way Google Search Engine works.
There is a difference between the Processing stage that parses HTML and Renderer stage which executes Javascript.
This was implemented and is a smart move from Google because Javascript is expensive and Googlebots need to look at over hundreds of trillion webpages.
So it parses HTML immediately and puts Javascript in queue to run it later.
That is a reason, why Google prefer different types of modern technologies more, than old ones.
Let's talk more about this.
Here are some steps to set up SEO perfectly:
1. Content optimization
This is important step from the whole Search Engine Optimization perspective.
Create high-quality, informative, and engaging content that your target audience is looking for, using your chosen keywords in a natural and strategic way.
Researching and selecting the most relevant and valuable keywords for your website would improve the way Search Engines treat your page.
Because it helps find relative content to the user, and ease the load on Google Servers to get the right information from the user's input.
2. On-page optimization
Optimizing your website's title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, image "alt" tags and header tags will make it easy for search engines to understand what your site is about.
Search Engine Optimization needs help setting up, so we need to align our code accordingly.
In <head> section of our page, we can use <meta> tag to directly tell Google how to understand and treat our page.
Title
<title>{"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet"}</title>
<title> isn’t exactly a meta tag, but is used by Search Engines and is important part:
Description
<meta
name="description"
content="Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipsing elit. Aliquam ac purus elit. In magna nisi, pulvinar et commodo vitae, elefiend in est. Sed eget diam metus"
/>
Where name tells to put it in description section of Google Search and content is a text of meta tag:
Google will crawl your page, and if description of a page is absent or Googlebot finds it very common (could be used in any other webpage, isn’t unique), it is going to ignore the tag and find relative text inside of a page to use and show it instead.
This behaviour can be disabled:
<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir" />
These are instructions to search engines not to use information from web directories when showing your site in the search results.
Icon
Uploading web application icon to this service will help optimizing it for different sizes and types of devices.
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
Additional:
Google Search Engine is a smart machine, but many times it confuses what is the website’s main picture is, so we can help Google understand your site better.
Setting up a Schema for structured data is going to be a solution.
These are now <script> tags and they go to <head> section as well.
For example, this would help Google identify which is the desired image for current page, so it could show it next time your page appears in search.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
'@context': 'http://schema.org',
'@type': 'WebPage',
'@id': 'https://example.com/#webpage',
url: 'https://example.com/',
name: 'Example',
primaryImageOfPage: { '@id': 'https://img.example.com/logo.svg' },
}
</script>Where primaryImageOfPage is a link to the Logo or Primary Image.
To Show Frequently Asked Question in Google.
It might be good thought to tell your FAQ of page directly to Google so it could show it next time with appropriate request from user.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
'@context': 'https://schema.org',
'@type': 'FAQPage',
mainEntity: [
{
'@type': 'Question',
name: 'What?',
acceptedAnswer: {
'@type': 'Answer',
text: 'Nothing!',
},
{
'@type': 'Question',
name: 'What?',
acceptedAnswer: {
'@type': 'Answer',
text: 'Nothing!',
},
{
'@type': 'Question',
name: 'What?',
acceptedAnswer: {
'@type': 'Answer',
text: 'Nothing!',
},
],
};
</script>3. Technical optimization
Ensure that website is technically sound - meaning that it is fast, mobile-friendly, and has a clean and organized code structure.
Google has a guide for managing your crawl budget here.
Using CDN
GoogleBots also look at how long it takes to load webpage, so it ranks it up accordingly.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is going to take the workload down, since it’s not the actual code that’s heave to load, but mostly the images and additional libraries that can be loaded from servers that are closer to the user.
Unnecessary code
Page should not execute any additional code that is not essential for page.
At least doing it later, when user is using the app.
Loading code asynchronously will speed up the app's loading time. Using KISS and YAGNI principles while developing an app also would help.
4. New Technologies
Frameworks like NextJS are one of the best solutions for SEO and GoogleBots to crawl since the content is loaded using the SSR (server-side rendering).
This approach enables the server to render the app and send the rendered version to the user already, while other Javascript code loads in the background.
Sounds pretty good, right?
While search engines will receive HTML directly from the server and doesn’t need generating HTML while crawling.
5. Link building
Building links to your website from other reputable websites can help boost your site's authority and ranking.
This can even be monitored through Google Search Console, in Links tab - List of website's that has linked your page somewhere.
More steps:
6. Monitor and analyze
Tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console will give opportunity to monitor your website's perfomance and identify areas for improvement.
7. Principles
We should use these principles to understand the way Google ranks our page and align our site in favor:
- It should be quick to load the page (Using CDN)
- It should not execute any code that’s not essential for page.
- User should use the site as soon as it is possible.
Roughly, it is referred to the following:
- Time To Interactive (TTI), the time at which a page becomes interactive (user can scroll, click, etc.)
- Time to First Bite (TTFB), the time to receive the first bite of content after clicking a link
- Size of Bundle, total bytes of code downloaded and executed before showing a page to user.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), how long it takes for the Largest Content Element to be visible within visitor’s viewport.
Conclusion
Google Search is a powerful tool for users to discover requested sources of information, Google found smart ways to rank up different websites and surely most of the time Google needs our help setting up different less or more important things for our site for our own benefit.
Remember that SEO is an onging process and requires ongoing effort and optimization to achieve and maintain high rankings in search engines.
Oleksii Pylypenko
CEOI'm a CEO and a Co-Founder of Trimsy. I deeply appreciate the encouragment and mutual benefit from the associates I am given a chance to have a journey with. We are thinkers and doers, difficulties could be challanging, but that is the beauty of it. Doing things with speed does not mean doing them imperfectly, the only way to not fall back - is to go forward.
