SEO or Search Engine Optimization enables you to reach more potential customers or users with the equivalent content on your website. Spending time optimizing your website to be as SEO friendly as possible yields higher results.

We’ll demonstrate how to :

• Apply a good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy
• Use good practices to optimize your website in both performance and quality.

It is essential to increase the quality of your website to generate more traffic. You’ll either make more sales or get more readers, therefore increasing your revenues. SEO should not be taken likely. It is one of the main factors that impact your success or demise.

Why should you spend time learning about search engine optimization?

It is your best marketing asset. It brings you quality traffic on your website, blog, or shops for free. What if you could attract thousands of users with just your content and not the ads you are running?

Why do you have to optimize the speed of your website?

The loading speed of a site is critical!

A website that loads quickly will be more appreciated by its users, but especially by Google and other search engines.

Google references nearly 300,000 billion pages; imagine how long it takes to visit everything.

Google allocates a certain amount of time for each site. If your website takes 1 second to load, Google will spend ten times more time on your website compared to a website that loads in 10 seconds. These are the main reasons why optimizing your website is very important.

Optimize your website and speed up the loading speed of your pages.

By following these tips, you will improve your loading time. Beware! These tips are not always easy to implement.

Why is loading time an essential criterion for your visitors?

A Microsoft study shows that between 2000 and 2016, the average attention span of a human being has decreased from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, which is less than that of a goldfish (9 seconds)!

What does this mean for your visitors?

The page needs to be displayed as quickly as possible to show the maximum amount of content to the user before his or her attention decreases.

So you have understood that good SEO (search engine optimization) starts with improving the speed and performance of your website. It is essential to make your website perform equally on computers and mobiles.

Google Page Speed Insights

To find out what’s wrong with your website, we advise you to use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

This tool developed by Google allows you to analyze the loading time of your website.

Google gives you a speed score on mobile and computer and explains the different points that need to be optimized to improve your performance.

JPEG and WebP for your image format

Most websites lose much performance because their images are not optimized. On some websites, images account for up to 90% of the loading time.

We recommend using JPEG and WebP. These formats are optimized for the web, allowing efficient compression with sizes that depend on the resolution of the device. There is no point in downloading a 4k image to a phone with 720 pixels.

Content Management Systems: Plug-ins Hell

You probably know Wordpress, Wix, …

All these CMS (content management systems) allow you to easily and quickly create your website and allow users to add many plug-ins or scripts on your website.

We advise you to be very careful with plug-ins and scripts, as they can significantly reduce your loading speed. Only use the ones you need.

A large part of browsing and searching on Google is on mobile devices, so it is imperative to optimize your website for mobile devices (tablets and smartphones).

Due to the lower performance and size of mobile devices compared to computers, it is essential to lighten the content visible on the screen on the mobile version of your website. You can’t show everything. It is crucial to select the critical content that the user needs to see to optimize navigation on these devices.

The best F1 driver will never win a Grand Prix if his car is a 2cv.

Choose your hosting wisely

You must choose your hosting platform carefully! Its impact is much more important than you think!

The speed of it impacts the loading time of your pages and reduces the quality of the user experience and your natural referencing.

Here are already some key elements to start optimizing your blog or shop and improve your search engine optimization.

How to optimize your tags, titles, meta descriptions, and keywords to maximize your SEO?

First of all, the title must be more or less 50 characters long and must naturally include as many keywords as possible. Don’t try to make extended titles. Google doesn’t like that!

The same goes for URLs, just 3 to 5 words. No more!

Subtitles must naturally contain the maximum number of keywords or synonyms without being too long.

Article should be at least 1500 words long

For your articles, try to write at least 1500 words (500 at the strict minimum).

It allows search engines to understand the theme of your article or page and to better reference you on a more significant number of queries.

Don’t forget that the quality of your text is also paramount. Even if your content is optimized for SEO, if the user doesn’t like it, it won’t lead to anything! For your images, don’t forget to put the alt tag and to put one or more keywords in the file name.

Tip: You can also create links between your pages and your content by using anchor text keywords.

In addition to improving your natural referencing, this gives a subtle effect when the user clicks on it, and the page sends him directly to the right section.

The tedious part is over! With all this data, search engines have a better chance of making it easier to reference you. And your ranking should improve!

Integration of social networks in your SEO strategy

It is essential that from the beginning, you are very active on social networks. Do not hesitate to share links to your articles on different networks by putting attractive images to generate traffic.

It seems that Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook known this way!

A link on a forum or a site in the same theme as your site also improves your SEO. Be careful not to spam the web with links to your pages! Also, be meticulous not to post links from your website on sites that are not in the same theme as you. Search engines will have more difficulties to find your topic and, therefore, to reference you.Also consider using a legitimate link building service to acquire more links. I use this SEO panel.

It is also essential to have on each page of your site a module to share on social networks. For example, a “share” button or a comment plug-in integrated to Facebook.

However, be careful about privacy protection. You must warn users that you use cookies and other scripts on your site. You can incur a hefty fine if you don’t notify users.

Beware, too many plug-ins, decrease your loading speed and, therefore, your SEO. It’s up to you to find out how to do it!

Social Accounts

Create a Google My Business, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn page all connected to your site. Web-users will be able to share the content of your pages and articles more easily on social networks.

Don’t forget to fill in the Meta title and Meta description tags on your pages to determine the title and description when sharing.

Optimize your website for the user experience

After all, it is the user who searches for your site on Google!

So let’s talk about ergonomic optimization. With our advice, you should be able to make your site more attractive to the Internet user, whether on a computer or mobile.

• It is essential to have a transparent, easily accessible, and readable menu.

Take care that your menus are not too complicated and that the user can easily access information. The user should not spend too much time to find what he is looking for on your menu, so it is essential to optimize it.

• Don’t hesitate to play with fonts and “bold” to emphasize certain content.
• Adapt the resolution and position of the items to the device you are using.

A small piece of advice, in general, websites are more refined on the phone than on the computer. You can put a lot more text on your computer version. Be careful not to have too much text on your mobile version, or the user won’t have a pleasant experience.

It is imperative to have a website or page that the user can quickly browse through and easily understand the subject.

Now that you have applied all our methods, how do you measure the results?

If you have followed all our advice so far, you probably want to know what the impact is on your website. First of all, don’t hesitate to measure your performance gain with the Google Page Speed Insights tool.

You will be able to see what you still need to improve to optimize your performance and your natural referencing.

Here are three essential tools:

• Google Universal Analytics allows you to track your traffic statistics.
• Google Search Console to track your ranking on Google, monitor issues, and see the queries users are looking for when they come to your site.
• Bing Webmaster Tools to see your position in search results in Bing, and yes, Bing still exists!

If you follow all our tips, your website should see its SEO score improve thanks to optimized loading speed and more thematic content. You should appear in more search results, and Internet users will appreciate your website more.

With these three tools, you should have access to enough data to know if your SEO strategy and optimizations have worked.

If you ever have any questions about how to optimize your website or improve its SEO, do not hesitate to ask us questions via the comment section below.