In this Mini Boost, I will show you three easy ways to immediately improve your SEO rankings. Remember, if you need assistance with any of these tips, please contact me for a free quote to optimize your site.
Page Speed
Did you know that Google and Bing take page-loading speed into account in their website ranking algorithm? Slow load = quick leave. GTMetrix is the go-to tool to measure your site loading times. It provides a detailed report of the shortcomings and even offers a few suggested remedies. Test your site today!
Your site needs to be lean and clean. The images, bells, and whistles need to enhance the message… not replace it. People come to your site for the content. Don’t make them wait for it unnecessarily. If your site needs a speed boost, I can help. Contact me to get your site boosted.
Image optimization
The biggest culprit for slow page load times is bloated images. Trust me, you don’t want Google to hate your website. Large images slow down your web pages which creates a less than optimal user experience. Fortunately, when you reduce your image’s file sizes you immediately improve your website’s performance.
What is image optimization? Optimizing images is the process of decreasing the file size of the image. However, this does not mean grabbing the corner of the photo and scaling the dimensions. Scaling won’t shrink the weight of the image, just the appearance of the weight. Kinda like a Fun House mirror.
Most web designers acquire their beautiful stock photos at their highest resolutions. However, those high image resolutions are for printing purposes. A web page only needs a fraction of that resolution. Before you upload that iStock Godzilla to your WordPress database, you need to reduce the resolution down to the actual size you need. Here is a great blog post with step by step instructions to show you how to optimize your images. Or Contact me to optimize your images and speed up your site.
Most professionals use Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, two popular commercial tools that will optimize images. But you can use a free online tool to do this too.
Header tags
Let’s remember our days in high school when we learned about the outline. Your content structure is read and understood by search engine spiders. When the spiders crawl your site, they will hopefully have a sitemap to show them around your site. When the spiders arrive at your page they won’t know what to look at first unless you tell them with header tags.
There are six header tags, ranging from H1 to H6. Each denotes decreasing importance. H1 is the most important, and should only be used once per page, typically for the title/headline of the post. Multiple H1 tags on the same page will be punished by search engines with lower SEO rankings. Each successive heading element should be used as a subcategory of the one above. Basically, it will look like this:
• H1: Headline of the Blog Post Here
Text enclosed in the <p> tag for paragraphs
• H2: Subheading for First Major Section
Text enclosed in the <p> tag for paragraphs
• H3: Sub-subheading for the First Major Section, If applicable
Text enclosed in the <p> tag for paragraphs
• H2: Subheading for Second Major Section
In this Mini Boost, we learned 3 easy ways to immediately improve your SEO rankings with Page speed, image optimization, and GTMetrix.com. By making these three site improvements you can see your search engine rank improve. These are boosts that you can make yourself, but if you need some assistance with your website optimization, please contact me today!
