That is why as soon as you create a website, start taking care of it. In this post, we will demonstrate that to improve search engine rankings you do not need any third parties or the superb expertise in web development. The only precondition for success is your persistence and desire to turn your hardly visited website into a profitable project. So, let’s get to work, shall we?
5 Steps to Get Your Website Crawled Faster
Step 1. Create Quality Content
What you publish is the starting point for improving search engine rankings. If you are out of ideas about the topics that might interest your target audience at the moment, try to attract your visitors with freebies. For instance, make lists of free services and goods connected with your business and share them online. In short, if the content you produce is relatable, you will see that your website gets crawled faster. How so? For starters, remember that search engine crawlers react positively when they “see” that actual people generate their own content based on your texts. For instance, if your posts excite the growing number of comments, it means that your content triggers reactions from online visitors. In fact, it is not even important whether these reactions are positive or negative. For search engine crawlers, comments are signals to index your pages quicker and more often, which leads to the improvement of rankings. One more important signal that your website is gradually improving its search engine status is backlinks from reputable web platforms. The better the content, the more backlinks, the higher search engine rankings.
Step 2. Keep to the Schedule
It is a common mistake of newbies to think that once a website is online it will work. It will not. A website is like a living creature – it should be taken care of on a regular basis. So, get into the habit of staying on top of things. To stay focused, make a list of procedures that your website has to undergo regular and keep to that list no matter what. For example, make it a habit to publish fresh content at least once a week. According to Statista, most global bloggers post at least several posts a month. So should you. Form a habit to check whether you have placed important keywords strategically on a new page/post. By “strategically” we mean in the title, headings, image descriptions, etc. Why do you need keywords? Well, they help you produce the content that is in demand. When a visitor finds what (s)he was looking for on your website, this visitor stays longer on the website and is more likely to click on CTA buttons. For search engine crawlers, it is a good sign. Where do you find keywords to stuff your website with the quality content? Well, right off the top of our head, we’d say the Google Ads Keyword Planner.
Also, run a monthly check to analyze clicks, critical errors, dead links, etc. Run tests to find out what post, page, and CTA button is the most/least popular. This is the only way to see where your website gets most of its traffic and where the bounce rate is still high. In other words, the more you know about what is happening backstage, the quicker your website will improve search engine rankings.
Step 3. Be Mobile-Friendly or (even better) Mobile-First
As more people choose to use their smartphones and tablets for surfing the Internet, the responsive design has become a must-have for most sites. The growing preferences for small-screen devices over desktops have transformed the way we see mobile content marketing. However, being mobile-friendly can still stand for being “shortened or simplified”. In order to avoid this stereotypical thinking, it makes sense to try a mobile-first approach. Investing in the development of meaningful user experience for a small-screen device and then enriching this experience for a desktop seems like a good idea, doesn’t it?
Step 4. Perfect Visual Stimuli
It is self-evident that websites are dominated by visuality. Thus it is small wonder that by adding videos and images to your web project you automatically optimize the performance of your website big time. This being said, remember that visual stimuli are not limited to imagery and videos. Visuality is a much broader concept that concerns every object visible on your website. So, if you want to improve search engine rankings and boost the visual perception of your website at the same time, you need to:
provide alt tags or alternative text descriptions that contain the niche-specific keywords for every single image on your website; apply compression techniques to reduce the size of photos; structure your text into meaningful sections to make it comprehensible; limit the sentence length to 25 words; use headings appropriately; be consistent with the design patterns and the color palette.
Step 5. Revisit Your Website’s Structure
But what to do if you did everything mentioned above and it did not help? Then it makes sense to revisit and question the navigation, the layout, and the overall hierarchy of your online project. Yes, it may be painful at first to realize that your target audience does not respond to some design elements the way you hoped. Yes, (re)branding and (re)building the website can be scary and time-consuming. But it is better than to see your online project get rusty. Desperate times call for desperate measures, as people say.
Conclusion
All in all, to improve search engine rankings, you need to embrace the idea that a website is a non-static growing organism. Do not expect it to remain the same six months after being designed. To improve the search engine rankings, you need to stay focused on the final goal. One more important thing is to not to rush your fences. Do you remember how much time you spent on developing and designing your website? Well, now double and then triple that time. This is how you get the idea of what amount of time you need to spend on the website within the next couple of months so that it shows up on the first page of search engines. Make no mistake – all your hard work will pay off in the end!
