Essential Web Optimization Strategies Every Developer Should Know

Want to optimize your website correctly and rank first? We have got you covered. What really matters today?

 Focussing on the SEO essentials should be your hack to optimizing your website. The next question we ask is what are these essentials?

The following will delve into what those factors are and what is involved to optimize for each.

1. Mobile-First

Google officially began rolling out the mobile-first index in March 2018.

Smart marketers were taking a mobile-first approach long before the official rollout.

According to Google’s Danny Sullivan:

“Neither mobile-friendliness nor a mobile-responsive layout is required for mobile-first indexing. Pages without mobile versions still work on mobile and are usable for indexing. That said, it’s about time to move from desktop-only and embraces mobile ”

Here are some basics for making your site mobile-friendly:

  • Make your site adaptive to any device – be it desktop, mobile, or tablet.
  • Always scale your images and videos so your site is more responsive and doesn’t take a lot of time to load
  • Short meta titles make the content easier to read. Use as many short meta titles as possible.
  • As any user goes through the website they like to get a glimpse of what the entire content is. Having too many pop-ups makes it difficult for a user to browse through them. Make it a seamless experience to go through the content
  • Make it your motto “Less is more”. A lot of content on your website wouldn’t lead to more website traffic. Use less content but more important and easy-to-read stuff on it.

2. Technical SEO

Some find the idea of performing technical SEO to be intimidating. Thanks to the many SEO tools available, an SEO audit is no longer a daunting task. The key, however, is to know how to interpret the data provided and what to do with it. For starters, you should check the following:

  • Check the mobile-friendliness of your site
  • Check for status code errors and correct them.
  • Check the robot.txt for errors. Optimize if needed.
  • Check your site indexing via Google Search Console. Examine and fix any issues discovered.
  • Fix duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions.
  • Audit your website content. Check the traffic stats in Google Analytics. Consider improving or pruning underperforming content.
  • Fix broken links. These are an enemy of the user experience – and potentially rankings.

Submit your XML sitemap to Google via Google Search Console.

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3. Core Web Vitals

As the name implies, this Google initiative is designed to quantify the essential metrics for a healthy website. The ultimate goal is to deliver the best user experience.

Beginning sometime in 2021, this “Page Experience” Signal will be incorporated into Google’s core algorithm, as a ranking factor.

According to Google, “loading experience, interactivity, and visual stability of page content, and combined are the foundation of the 2020 Core Web Vitals.”

Each one of these metrics:

  • Focuses on a unique aspect of the user experience.
  • Is measurable and quantifiable for an objective determination of the outcome.

Tools to Measure Core Web Vitals

  • PageSpeed Insights: Measures both mobile and desktop performance, and provides recommendations for improvement.
  • Lighthouse: An open-source, automated tool developed by Google to help developers improve web page quality. It has several features not available in PageSpeed Insights including some SEO checks.

Search Console: A Core Web Vitals report is now included in GSC, showing URL performance as grouped by status, metric type, and URL group.

4. User Intent

Writing “great content,” optimizing it, and getting trusted links is now just the start for ranking a keyword. As machine learning and deep learning continue to evolve, each will carry more weight in Google’s core algorithm.

The ultimate goal for Google is to understand the context and serve results based on searcher intent.

This makes advanced-level keyword research and selection more important than ever.

For starters, you need to recognize there are some keywords and queries that will be impossible to rank for.

A keyword’s contextual relevance must align with a search query.

Before spending time and resources trying to rank for a phrase, you need to look at the current ranking websites and phrases.

Unless your website and landing page are similar to what is ranking, chances are it won’t happen.

5. Content Marketing

The challenge to break through the clutter will become exponentially more difficult as time passes.

In order to do so:

  • Create a content hub in the form of a resource center.
  • Fill your resource hub with a combination of useful, informative, and entertaining content.
  • Write “spoke” pieces related to your resource hub and interlink.
  • Write news articles related to your resource and interlink.
  • Spread the word – promote your news articles on social channels.
  • Hijack trending topics related to your content – promote them on social media.
  • Use your smartphone camera. Images and videos typically convert better than text alone.
  • Update stale and low-trafficked content.
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6. User Experience

User experience (UX) is centered on gaining insight into users, their needs, their values, their abilities, and their limitations. UX also takes into consideration business goals and objectives. Best UX practices focus on improving the quality of the user experience.

 Factors influencing UX include:

  • Useful: Your content needs to be unique and satisfy a need.
  • Usable: Your website needs to be easy to use and navigate.
  • Desirable: Your design elements and brand should evoke emotion and appreciation.
  • Findable: Integrate design and navigation elements to make it easy for users to find what they need.
  • Accessible: Content needs to be accessible to everyone – including the 10% of the population with disabilities.
  • Credible: Your site needs to be trustworthy in order for users to believe you.
  • Valuable: Your site needs to provide value to the user in terms of experience and to the company in terms of positive ROI

7. Link Building

Links have been among the top-ranking factors for quite some time now. Google has become more adept at identifying and devaluing spammy links. That being the case, quality will continue to trump quantity.

The Best Link Building Strategies

  • Utilize Resource Pages.
  • Broken Link Building.
  • Backlink Mining.
  • Link Reclamation.

Claiming Unlinked Mentions.