Ever since the early days of the internet, webmasters have been preoccupied with finding ways to make their sites rank highly on search engines.
At one point, the best way to do this was a practice called keyword stuffing: simply having a certain string of keywords, like “beach umbrellas Miami”, repeated until it represented around 10 per cent of an entire article was enough to get it to appear on a search engine results page. Naturally, this led to some very poorly written articles, with keyword strings mashed into all sorts of uncomfortable and inappropriate places.
Updates to Google’s search algorithm, most notably the Panda series of updates that started in 2011, changed all of that. Suddenly, Google’s crawler understood an article’s context, and ranked pieces of content according to how well it addressed the intent of a certain search query, rather than simply how many times a keyword was repeated in the piece. Google began to rank sites based on how well they were built, how long users stayed on them, and most importantly, how good their content was. Naturally, sites that depended solely on keyword stuffing quickly fell from search results pages.、
If you’re a webmaster and want to prevent your site from becoming consigned to the internet’s waste bin, here are some tips for improving your site’s performance on search engines. These tips are some of the most commonly recommended by an SEO agency Singapore residents trust.
Ensure Your Site Is Mobile-First
Most web development platforms do this by default anyway, but the importance of optimising a site’s appearance for a mobile display, even before considering how it would appear on a desktop computer, cannot be overstated. Of the estimated 4.6 billion internet users worldwide, around 4.3 billion of them access the web from a mobile device. Designing a site that isn’t optimised for more than 90% of users will likely result in them clicking away, resulting in an increased bounce rate, which, in turn, will have a negative impact on your site’s search performance. If your site is stuck in a development platform that doesn’t offer adaptive or mobile-first design by default, it’s definitely time to migrate to one that does.
It should be noted that Google has never explicitly stated what its algorithm uses to determine how sites are ranked. However, the company has always maintained that high-value content will inevitably win out, so simply use the above tips to improve your site’s content quality, and you’ll soon see a host of improvements.
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