Anyone who owns or operates a website should understand the importance that search engine optimization can play in a consistent flow of traffic and exposure for their brand. Search engines have become increasingly finicky about who and what is allowed to reach the first page of select SERPs, primarily due to a combination of increased spam and more competition. There just simply isn’t enough free space these days to feature everyone prominently in relevant search results. Because of this, webmasters have been inspecting various elements of their websites in an attempt to determine what search engines want from them. The following article will outline a few of these elements, giving you the knowledge necessary to make quick changes and perform better in SERPs.

Sitemaps

One of the most basic elements of your website that can send out good (or bad) indicators is a sitemap. This feature contains the links of all of your web pages and organizes them in a fashion that will allow users and search engine crawlers alike to find all of your pages easily. Some people use XML to create a sitemap, while others stick to simple HTML. Whenever you are pinging search engines, a sitemap can quickly allow for all pages to be indexed, giving you greater reach in various search results and more opportunities to be featured on the first page.

Speed

Over the past couple of years, it has become increasingly clear that Google and other search engines now assess page loading speeds and other factors into how well your site is ranked. Perhaps the best way to add an extra bit of speed to your website is to check and revise any coding that may be messy. One study showed that improper code throughout the infrastructure of a website can account for as much as sixty percent of the difference between a site’s current speed and its optimal loading speed. Faster page loading times is yet another way you can boost your site’s performance in niche SERPs.

Use Text

Some people make the mistake of using Flash or incorporating text into images as a way to save space. This can be efficient for some purposes, but will not help you when it comes to pinging search engines. Google, Bing and others cannot read the graphics in your image and classify them for search engine ranking, so you lose a lot of potential when you take this route. In addition to this, Flash is incompatible with SEO, making it worthless for those who want to do better in one SERP or another. By sticking to plain text in these circumstances and optimizing it for search engines, you can potentially avoid missing out on first-page rankings.

Conclusion

If you want to improve the performance of your website in search engines, then a few basic steps can be followed to encourage this. For starters, you need to have a functioning sitemap that directs users and bots to all of your pages. Next, you should address any issues that may impact the loading times of your pages. Finally, avoid the use of imagery and Flash in lieu of text, as search engines cannot properly index this content in the same way as text.