We all know how important SEO is to ranking a site, but we don’t all have the time to implement every small-detail SEO trick in the book. Do you need your site to be better search engine optimized but don’t have all day? Here are some quick fixes to boost your site.
Allow Your Site to Be Crawled
By default, your site should allow search engines to crawl your site to determine its relevancy and page ranking. But if you’ve had your site for a while, somewhere down the line, you might’ve installed robot.txt files to keep search engines from doing this, or worse, disallowed search engines from crawling at all. It’s easy to make mistakes as a rookie, but make sure you fix critical mistakes like these as soon as possible.
Write a Sitemap
A sitemap will let search engines crawl and index your site easier, and it will provide them with a map to do it. Basically, a sitemap will tell Google how your site is laid out and which pages are above others in the site hierarchy. A sitemap is written in XML, a markup language that is similar to HTML. You don’t need to worry about knowing all the technicalities of XML to include a sitemap on your site. There are a ton of tutorials and even sitemap generators out there that will do the hard work for you.
Give Your Pages Unique Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Keywords are obviously a very important part of ranking your site, and it’s no different for your pages’ titles. All of your pages should have a title that is unique from other page titles on your site and which includes one or two keywords that are relevant to both your site and the page specifically. During this process, make sure that all your pages have a meta description that describes that briefly describes the page and will show up in search results.
Include Image Tags
Not only should your site include meta tags, your images should as well. On their own, images are not crawled or indexed by search engines. That’s why you need to give them a little help to show up in search results. Add a quick, keyword-friendly image tag to each of your images to get them showing up when people search.
Incorporate Relevant Anchor Text Links
Links are very important to SEO, but many go about creating the links in a way that isn’t SEO-friendly. Rather than having the anchor text include a phrase such as, “Click here to find out more,” make the phrase more keyword-friendly. For example, if you are linking to another page about WordPress tutorials, make your anchor text something like, “Check out this WordPress tutorial for more information”. Search engines rank these links higher than ones that aren’t keyword-optimized.
Correct Your Canonical Links
When making quick SEO fixes to your site, you shouldn’t be looking at only the links you’ve included in your content, you should also be making sure that you’re giving Google the best links to reach your site. This is called “canonicalization,” but don’t let the big word scare you. It can be quite easy to make sure that Google is getting those correct links. In fact, you can even check your canonical link elements en masse. This quick fix will give your site better ranking power in little time.
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