Work on your natural referencing may seem boring. For this reason I propose to you 5 concrete actions you can take right now to optimize your natural referencing. Whether your site is only a few months old or older, it’s time to take these actions…
I’m not going to talk to you about how to choose your keywords here, we’re assuming you’ve already chosen them. It’s a piece of research that deserves an article of its own. I’m going to share with you actions I did myself on my first blog. They enabled me to win several pages on Google very quickly. Here are some simple actions you can take Optimize your website’s natural referencing.
Improve your SEO by optimizing your URLs
When we write our articles, we’re often preoccupied with the content, we publish, and we forget about itOptimize our URLs for SEO. And yes, if you’re using WordPress as your site’s CMS and have made the necessary settings in the Permalinks menu, the URL will automatically adopt the title of your page or article.
Edit your URLs
Your page may have a relatively long title with small words that do nothing for search engine optimization. Except you add unnecessary length to your URL. For example the title: “Ô Grain et à mesure: a food wholesaler against overpackaging‘ would result in an expanded URL with lots of little words like: and, at, a, in, for, the.
If you want to reference the grocery store name in this article, you can replace the default URL with this: https://monsupersite.com/o-grain-et-a-mesure. The URL is optimized for the expression “O grain et à mesure”.
Do 301 redirects
Warning, it’s important to take some precautions when changing your URLs after publication. Google will continue to point to your old URLs for some time and you will end up with pages that say: “Error 404 – Page not found“.
If you don’t want to lose the SEO advantage of existing pages, it’s imperative to tell Google that your page’s address has changed permanently. And it requires that when a visitor clicks on the old URL, they are automatically redirected to the new URL. This requires a 301 redirect.
No panic ! To perform a 301 redirect, simply edit the htaccess file. Either by using a plugin that does 301 redirects like an adult and integrates it into the htaccess file. Either by editing the htaccess file via the menu of Yoast SEO plugin. Or if you use another CMS, you can edit this file directly on your server.
Example of a 301 redirect to put in the htaccess file: Redirect 301 /my-url-n-was-not-terrible/ https://www.monsupersite.com/celle-ci-est-beaucoup-mieux/
Attention ! Because bad handling is easy to come by, save this file well before modifying it.
Optimize your titles and HTML tags
If we look at the example above: “Ô Grain et à mesure: a food wholesaler against overpackaging‘, isn’t a great title because it’s too long. If you then want to be well informed about the term “O grain and measure”, it is better to put this expression at the beginning of the sentence. It does, so that’s a good point. It is important that you place your keywords at the beginning of the sentence as often as possible. Provided it’s justified and not just to please Google.
As important as it is Place your keywords in your h2 titles, in the alt attributes of your images, and also in your links. We must avoid, at all costs, links to “click here“. Rather mention the name of the website you want to redirect your readers to or write a word relevant to your SEO. To the Optimize SEO of the content of your website you can use the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
However, be careful! Don’t over-optimize, remember first and foremost that your content needs to engage your readers. That’s the most important. Make quality by striving for it Tweak the SEO a bit.
Optimize the loading time of your pages
It is important to consider the loading time of your pages. Even if you tell yourself it won’t make the difference. Indeed, yes, at least a little, and in some cases a lot. There user experience can be very bad if the page takes a long time to load. And Google is increasingly considering user experience. To test your website’s display speed, you can go to the Gtmetrix website.
Compress your images
In order to improve the display time of your web pages, some basic SEO techniques need to be implemented. There are many reasons why your website might load slowly. However, one of the most common reasons is the resolution of your images. So we need to start compressing them.
In fact, for example, a blog will often show 1 main image per article. Depending on the number of articles displayed on your home page, you may have a lot of images that are slowing down your site’s display speed. It existsWP Optimize plugin on WordPress which can automatically manage the compression of your images.
It is also possible to do it yourself and be sure of the result. However, it all depends on the number of images on your site. If you have 5000, good luck doing it by hand.
Minify your javascript and css files
second thing to do Optimize the loading time of your pages is to minify your javascript and css files. Don’t panic, there are also WordPress plugins that will do this on their own. You can use the… WP Fastest Cache plugin. With this plugin you can make very advanced settings to increase the speed of your website.
Update your short articles to optimize your SEO
If you’re like me when I started, you may have started writing very short articles. Yes, when I started I said to myself that it would be better if I wrote a short and imperfect article right away than waiting for the day when I would write a crazy article. So I wrote my first 180 word article. Suffice it to say it’s not terrible for referencing. But when you start a blog, Optimize SEO is not necessarily what we look at first.
On the other hand, it is still necessary to keep in mind a very precise and well-chosen topic in order not to go from rooster to donkey, losing our readers as well as Google. Because they may not understand what the topic of the blog in question is. So if you’ve already published a number of articles and feel more comfortable writing them, you can go back to your old posts. In addition, you show Google that your articles are still relevant.
Optimize your SEO by generating backlinks
Backlinks are super important and that shows Google that your page is popular and popular because yes, it is mentioned! And the best way to get quoted, in my opinion, is to do nothing. Anyway, don’t ask. Seriously, if you do quality and good publicity, that’s how you get known.
So the question would be more like: How do you make yourself known? You can comment on publications in Facebook groups, share successful articlesyou can comment on other blogs, YouTube videos, write guest postsEtc.
If you are everywhere, we will recognize you by force. It’s a long-term job that takes time, and the benefits aren’t usually immediate. Unless you happen to be interviewed by a well-known and well-respected TV station. There you have immediate fallout.
Conclusion on optimizing the referencing
SEO is a task that needs to be done over time. Even though it can be neglected when starting a blog, there comes a time when it is necessary to optimize it in order to realize the full potential of your blog. It would be such a shame to write great articles that only a handful of people read because you don’t spend enough time on SEO. These 5 steps will help you quickly spot improvements in your blog’s SEO. Of course, SEO is a broad field! Feel free to share yours in the comments SEO tips to improve your website’s SEO !
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