Is your business website current with the latest SEO standards?

Has your website been underperforming lately? Not ranking as well as you would like or expect? Not getting enough traffic to your website? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the problem may be that your website is not compliant with the latest SEO standards, and as a result of this search engines such as google and bing may be penalizing your website and ultimately costing you money and business that you should be earning. Read this article to see if your current website is up following all of the latest SEO standards. By following the latest SEO standards and relying on professional Website Development, your business's website stands a much better chance of ranking well on all of the popular search engines, such as google and bing. And ranking well on the popular search engines will lead to much more business as a result.

So, what are the most important SEO standards to check for?

Is your site mobile friendly? This is very important for SEO, much more important than it was even just a few years ago. And the reason that it is so important is because of the obliquitness of mobile phones or so-called smart phones. Did you know that most internet traffic is now coming from cell phones and not laptops or desktops? Well, it is true. And this is the reason that making your business's website mobile friendly is so important, and this is also why major search engines, such as google and bing, place such a premium on mobile friendlieness. If your website is not mobile friendly, then you are risking penalties from search engines which will result in lower rankings in search results. Also it will reflect poorly on your business as as much as 70% of the traffic going to your website could be coming from cell phones and smart phones, and if your website does not look correctly on these devices it will reflect poorly on your business.

Does your website have an SSL certificate?

An SSL certificate is not necissarly a requirement if your website does not accept online payments and doesn't deal with other sensitive information such as social security numbers. However, an SSL certificate is a good idea even if your website does not accept online payments. Search engines will generally give your website more credit and higher rankings if your website has an SSL certificate. In a situation where everything else is equal, and your website has an SSL certificate and your competitor does not have an SSL certificate, then you will rank higher and ultimately earn more business than your competitor. So, while not a requirement, an SSL certificate for your website is always a good idea, and these days most SSL certificates only cost about $50 per year. An SSL certificate will also give visitors of your website, your customers, peace of mind that they are visiting a secure and safe website.

Does your website load fast?

Page speed, or the time it takes for your webpage to load is a very important ranking factor on all major search engines. Nobody likes a slow loading website. A recent study for walmart showed that for each extra second that their website took to load they lost something like 10% of sales, and this makes sense because most people will hit the back button if a website takes a long time to load. Search engines also tend to not like slow loading websites and will penalize your rankings if your website is slow and takes a long time to load. There are many online test sites that will test the loading time and page speed of your website. And if you have a slow website, these online testing sites will offer suggestions of things that can be done to improve the page speed. The most typical things that can be done to improve page speed are things like optimizing images with better compression algorithms, minifying certain parts of code, such as css and javascripts, and modifying server settings to utilize compression and caching technologies. If your website is slow, it could be costing you business, however there are fixes available which your Website Developer can remedy.

Are your title tags and meta descriptions SEO compliant?

If you do not know what title tags and meta descriptions are, do not worry. Its not that complicated. Basically, title tags and meta descriptions are information that describes what a particular webpage is all about. These items are only intended for search engines, to help them properly categorize the webpage, and they are not intended for viewers and visitors of the webpage. The title tags and meta descriptions are not visible to users of your website, except that they do show up in the search results. Title tags and meta descriptions are very important for search engines and your SEO efforts. If your title tags and meta descriptions are not what they should be then your website will never do as well as it should on all the major search engines, and this will also cost you business in the long run.

Are your keywords clearly defined in the text of your website?

Keywords are an obvious part of SEO for your website, yet they are often used incorrectly, or not enough, or too much. First, it is important that your keywords are carefully and correctly selected. For example if your website is about lawnmowers, then your keywords will involve lawnmowers, such as lawnmower repairs, lawnmower parts, etc. A little bit of research will help to identify specific keywords that will recieve the most traffic from the various search engines. The next step is to make sure that the text body copy of your website supports your chosen keywords. The text of your website needs to be like 'goldilocks' in a sense. The keywords should appear naturally in the text, and not appear 'stuffed' in just to be there. Also the keywords need to appear the correct number of times, not too little and not too many times. There is no exact number or formula for this, so a little trial and error can help out here. Also an SEO expert can review your website and identify things that are incorrect and things that will need to be fixed.

Do you have a backlinking strategy?

Backlinks are simply when a website links to a page of your website. However, it is not necessarly true that the more backlinks the better, when it comes to SEO. The important thing with backlinks is relevance and page rank. Revelance is simply that a website that is somehow related to what your website is all about (your keyword(s)) links to your website. If your website has a lot of backlinks that are not relavant to the content of your website, then that could be a negative. The page rank of the website linking to your website is also important. Bascially page rank is based on the age of the domain as well as the popularity of it (i.e. the total number of monthly traffic that the domain recieves). Backlinks are very important, but it is important to remember that you will want backlinks that are revelant to your content as well as backlinks with high page rank.

As you can see SEO can be very complicated and a solid strategy is necessary to achieve any level of success on search engines for your website. This is usually where professional SEO services come into play. SEO professionals can identify areas of your website that need improvement and recommend fixes that will help to improve your overall SEO success. However, no reputable SEO professional can ever guarantee specific results due to the inexact and unknown nature of search engines. If a SEO company tries to guarantee that they can get your website placed at the top of any search engine then they are most likely lying and trying to scam you. If you have any questions about SEO, feel free to contact us at 2 Ultra Media for free advice, although we will tell you up front, we are not an SEO company, however we do have a lot of knowledge and experience in SEO and know generally what will work and what will not work.