Why Has SEO Become So Important?
Consumerism has gained speed on digital media with the development of internet. With this speed, most of the brands have entered into digital sector and increased their investments. When there is demand, increasing supply has forced brands to go head to head with each other.
Websites should always stay up to date to keep up with the times and technologies. Their performances at search results directly affect their earnings. Because of this, sites should constantly improve their SEO performance in Google or other search engines.
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
SEO is the process of optimizing the websites to get more visibility in search engine results. SEO performance is crucial for websites of brands.
Search engine bots aim to deliver the best content to the web visitors with the best performance. Because of that SEO has a non-stop development process.
Visibility of sites in search results or accessibility of sites to the potential visitors depends on their SEO performance. This performance is determined by the parameters of search engines such as Google.
The sites scanned by the algorithms of the search engines are evaluated according to the conclusion of these parameters.
Google Says: Website Speed Affects SEO Performance
Google, which is one of the commonly used search engines, is constantly updating itself. With its developments, it aims to give the most relevant content to the visitors as soon as possible.
Also, its directives act as a roadmap for site administrators. These directives describe what general features the websites should have.
In a statement in 2010, Google stated that the site speed is a crucial factor for search rankings. This clearly shows that site speed directly affects the SEO performance.
In other words, it means that slow loading sites are ranked lower in Google results than the high loading ones.
Do you want your potential customers to see your website at higher ranks on Google results by accelerating your content?
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Which Google Parameters Determine Your SEO Performance?
The primary Google Analytics stats allow you to track your performance. With these stats, you can have information about the user experience of your visitors on your page.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate means that the visitors who land on one page of your website and leave without taking an action or viewing any other pages. In other words, if your visitors enter your site and immediately leave without taking an action, it means that there are points you need to improve.
One of the possible issues can be that your site content is not relevant or attractive to your visitors.
Average Session Duration
Session duration is the time it takes a web visitor to leave after clicking on your site. If this duration is high, it means that you have relevant content that engages the attention of your visitors and keeps them on your site.
Google bots consider that the sites with long session duration will make more contribution to their visitors. This statistic, which is considered positive by Google, also positively affects your performance. And it improves your SEO ranking on Google.
Pages/Session Rate
Pages/Session rate is an average number of pages viewed during a session or visit on your site. If a visitor views more than one page per session, it is a good sign. It indicates that they are highly engaged and willing to explore more of your site.
In this way, Google considers that your page has useful content for your visitors. This improves your SEO performance and increases the chance of your site being viewed more.
Common SEO Mistakes
There are some important points while working on this issue. In order to improve performance, it should be assured that the right steps are taken.
The steps taken to improve SEO ranking may negatively affect the user experience.
Here are the most common SEO mistakes you should avoid to improve your ranking in search results.
Creating Content Without Analyzing Keywords
Google bots look at the keywords to rank your site on search results. Google crawls the sites based on the keywords to show the most relevant result to the web user.
Because of that, your site content should be created with keywords suitable for the purpose of your site. Your site should have enough keywords in order to reach to your potential customers. The more relevant keywords your site has, the more likely it is to rank higher.
Therefore, you should do a keyword search before starting to create your site content. You can improve your SEO ranking on Google by determining the most relevant keywords for your site.
Not Using a CDN Service
CDN is a content delivery network. Your site contents are hosted in geographically distributed CDN servers around the globe. In this way, your site visitors can reach the content from geographically closest CDN server.
Since your site content is loaded quickly, your site speed will be high.
This high speed improves your site experience as well. There will be an increase in the conversion rate of your visitors into customers because they do not get any latency while browsing in the site.
Also, Google bots reach your site content from the closest CDN server and crawl your site. And it allows your site to rank higher in the search results.
So, using CDN to accelerate your content is one of the main methods to improve SEO performance.
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Focusing on Google Bots, Not Web Site Visitors
Google bots decide which rank your site will be in the search results. But this doesn’t mean that you should directly focus on Google bots.
It should not be forgotten that the main thing to be addressed is web users while taking the necessary steps to improve SEO.
Your contents should be created with plain and understandable language to motivate the visitors to read. The writings on your site should encourage the reader to both stay on the site and make a purchase.
The users who will ultimately be interested in and buy the product/service on your site are your visitors, not Google bots. So, you should create your site contents by understanding the feelings and thoughts of your visitors.
Not Using Any Google Analytics Tools
You should use Google analytics tools to follow up and analyze the user activities in your site with statistical data. With these tools, you can reach the data about many topics such as user activities, features of users, site link structure.
You can explore your site activities in search results and detailed features of your site visits. These data give tips about how your site should create a strategy in the virtual environment.
Also they allow you to find the technical problems of your site and ultimately improve your SEO performance.
Moreover, you can use all these tools for free. The commonly used Google analytics tools are as follows:
You can easily manage your SEO strategies by means of these tools.
Content Plagiarism
The other most common mistake is to create plagiarized content. Contrary to popular belief, creating plagiarized content does more harm than good to your site.
Google checks whether the content of sites is original or not. The originality of site content is one of the main features that determines its quality level in search engines. Since unoriginal content is determined as plagiarized content, the site is underrated, which damages the site.
You should create original content to not negatively affect your SEO ranking on search results.
In order to quote, you should create an outbound link by adding links to the words or sentences you are quoting. This will positively affect your user experience.
You can improve your SEO performance by taking into consideration these top 5 common mistakes.
How Does Your Site Speed Affect Your SEO Performance?
There are 2 reasons why your site speed affects your SEO performance. The first one is about how fast Google bots can crawl your site.
Fast crawled sites can respond to the search engines in a short time. The fast crawling process for all pages of a site means that its high speed has been proven by bots. In this way, your SEO performance will be positively affected.
The second one is the effect of site speed on user experience. The loading time of websites that respond quickly to search bots is higher. So, the web visitors can reach the page they want shortly after clicking on it.
When the visitors reach the content without losing time, they can navigate within website without having to wait. Thus, the site speed becomes one of the main factors that affects the increase in your conversions and customer satisfaction.
What Can We Do to Increase Site Speed?
There are multiple methods to increase your site speed. With these methods, you can experience increase in your site speed depending on its current state.
You can use the following methods to increase your site speed.
Accelerate Your Content with CDN
By means of CDN servers, your site visitors can experience a fast loading website. CDNs help your users access your website faster by hosting your resources in geographically distributed servers around the globe. With this faster access, you will experience a noticeable increase in your site speed.
CDN positively affects your SEO performance. It helps your site rank higher by ensuring that Google algorithms rapidly crawl all pages of it.
Your site visitors spend more time on your site without having to wait. And this increases the possibility of your potential customers making a purchase. Also, CDN secures your site against technical problems such as crashing down and against cyber attacks.
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Activate Gzip Compression
Gzip is a compression method to minify the size of your static files. Your compressed static files will be loading faster.
This method minifies your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files down to 150 bytes and so it provides to transfer these files more easily.
However, with this method, the quality of your images may seem to be decreased. So, you need to use another program to maintain the quality of your images.
Convert Your Images into WebP
This format developed by Google, enables you to minify the size of your images and maintain the quality of them as well. With Merlin CDN, you can easily convert your images into WebP by activating the relevant configuration on the panel without changing the images manually.
And, it minifies the total size of your site as well and you will get better user experience. For learning more about this method, you can check this blog article “Website Optimization with Merlin CDN”.
Optimize Your JavaScript, CSS and HTML Files
You can enhance your site speed by deleting unnecessary commas, spaces and other characters.
Also you can remove unused codes and code comments.
You can visibly increase your site speed by using many methods like these.
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