Creating a good website that will be profitable is quite difficult. Imagine that you already have a site, the menu is convenient, the information is useful and interesting. But here is the problem, the site is not visited. In such cases, the SEO tools are coming to help.
SEO does not standstill. Like many other aspects of our lives, search engine optimization is changing, and over the past few years, this process has accelerated markedly. Every year, algorithms become smarter and more insidious (if believe their statements), methods that have shown good results quite recently may already not bring results, and well, if they simply do not bring results, some may even be harmful. In this article, we will describe the basic and important aspects that you should know to keep your site up in 2020.
Here what aspects we are going to view in our blog:
Keyword Strategy
Site structure
Improve images
Keep in mind technical SEO aspects
Best SEO tools
Keyword Strategy
We came across cases where entrepreneurs came with a list of keywords in several pages and said: “let's write the content with all these keywords and we will be first in all search engines”. And you know what? we have never seen this company first in search engines because keyword research is not just about brainstorming.
Keywords should be suitable for some parameters:
Be relevant. By relevant we mean words that are close to your subject and information on any of your pages.
Competitive. If you promote a recently created resource by, for example, the keyword "click here" (several millions of impressions per month), then site promotion will take more than one year and will be excessively expensive.
Avoid keyword cannibalization. This case can happen if several pages on your site trying to rank for one keyword.
Don’t forget to make competitors research. Sites of competitors with open statistics that are in the top ten in search engines are analyzed for clicks on them by search queries. The information found will help you find the lost options for key phrases and discard unnecessary ones.
Site structure
Let’s talk about a sitemap because it’s one of the ways to structure your site and tell spiders how to interact with your site. There are several opinions about the sitemap. For different search engines, it works differently, maybe this is not a necessary measure, but it will not become superfluous. Let’s speak about two of them. For Yandex, sitemap.xml is an important entry point to the site. In the case of promoting large projects under Yandex, it makes sense to take care of the correct map. Googlebot during crawling is much more focused on the system of internal and external links. At a minimum, sitemap.xml does not really matter for indexing new sites on Google.
Make your site mobile friendly. Google has announced that by September 2020 all sites will be crawled and indexed by Google using mobile-first indexing. And if earlier the mobile version was “very desirable”, now it has become - “very mandatory”. But, the general methodology essentially remains unchanged.
Improve images
Another part of the optimization is the selection of images themselves, optimization of their size and file weight. Images should be of high quality, display equally well on all devices and not slow down page loading. Image relevance is one of the most important factors for search engines. Make sure the illustrations are relevant to the topic of the article.
Place images next to the text they illustrate, and give them names that describe a picture with keywords from the text. This will help a robot to identify what is on the picture.
Image quality is also important: blurry, fuzzy or poorly cropped images from a bad impression of the site and product. For SEO, it is also important that the images are original and not copied from other people's sites.
Keep in mind technical SEO aspects
Speaking about technical aspects, start from page speed because of Google mobile-first indexing, which we mentioned above. You can check the the speed of your site in Google pagespeed insights. Ideally to have 3 seconds, but if you are not staying with us we will help you improve this indicator.
First of all, increase your bandwidth. Bandwidth refers to how much data your Internet connection can transmit; the more bandwidth you have, the more data you can load at once. You can watch a hosting plan with better bandwidth on our site. Most new site owners choose the cheapest possible option for hosting. While this is often enough in the beginning, you’ll likely need to upgrade once you start getting more traffic. Since you have an e-commerce site don’t wait till these times? buy a one with the best parameters here. Also keep in mind such aspects as:
Make sure that your site’s size is not more than 5 mg
Minimize an HTTP requests
Better to use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files
Reduce server response time
Enable browser caching
Defer JavaScript loading.
What about the URL structure?
URLs should be used for people, it should be understandable and easy.
Don’t use underscores in your URLs, search engines simply don’t understand them, use hyphens.
Block the bad URLs with robots.txt.
Figure out 301 and 302 redirects.
To make the data entry process for you and your customers absolutely calm and trusting buy an SSL certificate.
Best SEO tools
So whether you need to perform keyword research, audit your website, do competitive research, or just want to see how well you rank on Google, you should use one or multiple of the best SEO tools. Here the list can be endless and you probably don’t need so much. That’s why we created the list of most useful ones.
Google search console
MOZ: SEO software
Ahrefs: SEO keyword tool
Answer the public
SEO spider
Still doubt what kind of website promotion to choose? Choose SEO! This is much cheaper and more effective than other known methods, although it requires the ability to wait, because you can see the first results no earlier than in 3-6 months.
Improving ecommerce SEO has many moving pieces, but isn’t without its rewards.
