Top 10 Tips to Optimize Your Website for Higher Engagement and Conversions
Assessing the quality of a website is an important factor for SEO marketers. It allows them to evaluate and improve their rankings and the quality of traffic that their website receives.
Here's how to evaluate the quality of your website and whether your SEO strategies have been paying off in improving the quality of your website:
1. Your Webpages Shouldn't Have Multiple H1 Tags
H1 tags aren't considered ranking factors for Google anymore. While one H1 tag is fine, multiple H1 tags can spoil readers' experience.
2. Website Should be Easily Crawlable
Plug your webpages into Google's family-friendly test. If you can crawl your website easily, only then search engines too can.
3. Properly Configured Webpages
Ensure that your site doesn't have discrete 404 pages.
4. Ditch JavaScript Based Navigation
If you are taken to a new URL, use straight-up HTML links to navigate the user.
CSS 3 coding can also be used for navigation. Seriously, ditch the JavaScript.
5. URLs Should Resolve to a Single Case
As search engines see all the instances of URLs at once, URLs in multiple cases can cause duplicate content issues.
6. Watch out for Flat Architecture
With a flat architecture all the pages are dumped into the root directory and the focus on topics or related topics is lost.
7. Be Mindful of Content Quality
The content present on the website should be of high quality and unique, relevant, and trustworthy. Avoid thin content at all costs.
8. Coding is More than Just "Copy & Paste"
If you're transferring a site to WordPress check the DOCTYPE used and ensure that it is cross-browser and cross-platform compatible.
9. Site Should Have Schema.org Structured Data Where Applicable
Schema is key to obtaining rich snippets on Google.
Even if your site does not lend itself well to specific structured data elements, there are ways to add structured markup anyway. First, performing an entity audit is useful for finding what your site is doing already.
If nothing, you can correct this inequity by adding schema markup to things like:
- Navigation.
- Logo.
- Phone number.
- Certain content elements are standard on every website.
10. Site Should Have XML Sitemap
Having an XML sitemap makes it much easier for search engines to crawl your website.
Things like 4xx and 5xx errors in the sitemap, non-canonical URLs in the sitemap, blocked pages in the sitemap, sitemaps that are too large, and other issues should be looked at to gauge how the sitemap impacts the quality of a website.
Wrapping Things Up
Website owners should also ensure that the website landing pages are optimized, the website has an error-free robots.txt file, the website has a responsive design with an ideal loading time of less than 2s, and should have excessive dynamic URLs throughout.
The above techniques will optimize your website for higher visibility, engagement & conversions.