A lot has changed in the world of web development in the last few years. With new formatting options, social media advertisements, and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, making a site “friendly” can be a complicated process. And to ensure that your company’s website is performing well on search engines, here are a few things that you can do to improve your current online status.
1. Register Your Domain
Search engines tend to favorite websites that have been in existence for more than a few years when evaluating a company for its keywords. And a brand new domain is more than likely to face problems in ranking in comparison to a domain that’s been around for a while. To ensure that search engines notice your business, make sure that you officially register your domain name online and renew it every year.
2. Sign Up for WHOIS
Another way to gain credibility with search engines is to register with WHOIS. That way, all of your contact and identifying site information can match with your WHOIS registration information, which can add a level of trust with other companies and prove that you are a legitimate business. Web sites that don’t sign up for WHOIS will have no verifiable data tied to a domain and usually treated with at least some level of suspicion.
3. Use a Content Management System (CMS)
To make things as easy as possible for search engines to recognize your site content, an SEO Austin company suggests using a standard content management system (CMS) such as WordPress. With familiar layouts and optimization of a site’s middleware and data, WordPress simplifies the process of rapidly understanding what a site is about and is also user-friendly. And while hand-coding has many benefits, it can often leave a search engine with no conventional frame of reference and can slow down its ability to find the information it needs.
4. Increase Your Site Speed
If your website takes a long time to load between pages, it can discourage search engines, readers, and potential customers from visiting your site. Problems in speed usually point to an issue that needs fixing, which can include image sizing, middleware breakdowns, or the quality of your web host. And to make your site as SEO-friendly as possible, be sure to fix any speed problems that you may have.
5. Create a Mobile Compatible Site
A huge percentage of browsing takes place on smartphones and tablets, which means that not only must a website load quickly on these platforms, but it also needs to look attractive and be user-friendly as well. If your site uses WordPress or another form of CMS, there are several options for transforming your site to fit a mobile version. And if your website isn’t mobile-friendly or responsive, you’re more than likely bypassing a large proportion of your potential customers.