To increase traffic to your website, you must first understand what drives search engines and how they go about achieving those goals.
The primary mission of the search engine is to create a good user experience for those who use their search capabilities. To achieve a satisfying experience, a search engine has to consider many factors.
However, these factors can be broken down into three broad categories.
Relevant content
Long before Google, there were already many other search engines on the Internet. Search engines like Alta Vista, ask Jeeves, Excite, etc. were household names back then lie how Google is today. However, while these companies understood the importance of search engines on the Internet, they did not understand the power of quality relevant content. Many a time, during those days, when you search on these platforms, the results that come back were disappointing.
Hence when a search engine (i.e., Google) that provided more relevant content came along, users migrated to the new platform. Users want quality relatable results. Being able to provide appropriate quality results is vital. If you do it right, your visitors will come.
Quality results, in turn, depend on the right keywords and relevant content. With good content, visitors will spend more time on the webpage, and they might even share the page out. These actions are signals to search engines that the webpage has some relevance to the user and potential users.
Download speed
With more and more users using their mobile users to surf the Internet on the go, download speed becomes increasingly important.
Download speed over mobile devices is typically slower compared to devices physically connected (i.e.,LAN) to the Internet. With the already slow connection, any webpage that adds to the slowness of the download will irk the user. This slow download would constitute a poor experience in the eyes of search engines. The website will be penalized by being ranked lower to a comparatively faster website. Hence, optimizing a website for faster download is critical.
It is imperative to check on your website download speed from time to time, especially when adding something new to it. The newly added image, functionality, may impact your site download performance.
Secure website
As cybercriminal activities intensify, search engines are increasingly putting more emphasis on website security. A new, more secure transmission protocol emerged because of this concern – HTTPS. With HTTPS in place, information that is transmitted between the web server and the client desktop or device is made more secure through encryption. Sites that run the HTTPS protocol have their domain name preceded by HTTPS in their URL.
In 2018, search engines like Google took it a step further by displaying a little padlock beside the URL of the website. Google even went further by providing warnings of unsecured webpages they are about to visit, to its users.
While doing all of the above three things doesn’t guarantee you will appear on the first page on any search engine result page, it will, however, provide you with the assurance that you are in line with the search engines’ mandate.
With over 100+ ranking factors to optimize, getting the above right will serve as a good foundation for your optimization effort to rank higher within the search engines.
