So, the second part is finally here. I am going to list the items that you should include in your SEO checklist.

I have already touched the surface on part 1. If haven’t read that yet, you better check it out.  For this post, I will explain in detail what the SEO factors are, and how it influences the search engines to understand your website better.

Of course, if it can easily scan your content, the search engines can give you a spot on the first page on the results page. Are you ready? Let’s continue on right away…

• The Meta Description
  • After the title tag, it is the meta description’s turn. If these 2 are well-written, your page gets more clicks. Because it tells the search engines that this page is constantly being accessed, the search engine will automatically bump your page up in terms of ranking.
  • The ideal number is a max of 160 characters. So, please create a meta description around that limit.
  • Same with the title, if the meta description is confusing, no one would dare click your page. It is best to give a general overview of your post. Keep the words simple and easy for everyone to understand.
  • Also, include relevant keywords to help you rank and get better SEO scores.
• The Breadcrumbs
  • Add some breadcrumbs to help everyone browsing your website to retrace their steps especially if it took them several clicks to get to that page.
  • There should be a guide on where they are, how they got to this point. So, in case they get lost while navigating, they can quickly find the pages relevant to their search. It would be frustrating to start the search all over again.
  • You can simply add text links to guide the web visitors, and these text links should be at the top so they can obviously see the URL structure.
    • I’m sure you already tried clicking the wrong page of a website. You wanted this page, but you accidentally clicked this page. Thus, breadcrumbs serve an important purpose in site navigation.
    • Also, the breadcrumbs help your web visitors and the search engines to know the hierarchy of your website. They can identify the different categories and topics. Thus, they quickly identify the articles that are related to each other.
    • Lastly, breadcrumbs ensure an enjoyable browsing experience because of the detailed URL structure. For example, you are looking for books on Amazon. In there, there text links that will tell you about the specific genre. Once you click mystery genre for example, you can easily browse for books under the same genre.
• A Link Within a Page
  • Speaking of books, it is also important to add something similar to “a table of contents” on a specific web page.
  • This is helpful when you are explaining about a topic in great detail. You can just add jump links to a specific section. So, the web visitors can just go to the section that interests them, and skip the areas they don’t want.
  • Look at Wikipedia, they provide jump links on every  web page. For example, you searched for the dog breed Akita. There will be jump links for the overview of the breed, the Akita breed history, the description, the expected health, and etc. So, if I’m only interested on knowing the dog’s appearance and coat, I will immediately go to the description section.
  • It simplifies things if you offer jump links. Not to mention, it saves you a lot of time! No need to scan a page from top to bottom.

I’m back for another post on improving the search experience of your web visitors. Previously, I discussed the importance of adding a search box and how it influences positive results for your website.

If you haven’t, you can catch up here. Once you’re ready, continue on reading part 2. Below are the additional tips designing and installing your search box:

• The Search Box Should Aim to Improve Incorrect Keywords
  • Anticipate misspellings of words. Your search box must be adaptable to changes of the terms and possible errors in the spelling.
  • No one is perfect. Sooner or later, someone make a mistake. So, to anticipate future mistakes, the search functionality should be:
    • Flexible: should not be case sensitive
      • Whether one types in in lowercase or uppercase, the results should not differ.
    • Knowledgeable: should consider singular or plural words
      • Whether the words used are wither singular or plural, there should be similar results.
    • Able to distinguish American and British English
      • If one types in British, there should be suggestions using the American spelling, and vice versa.
      • For example, when one types “colour”, there should be a prompt saying: do you mean “color”?
    • Able to ignore STOP WORDS
      • Words such as “a”, “on”, “of”, “the”, “and”, “in” are considered stop words.
      • The search box should ignore these terms. Because if it is included, then, all of your content will show up on the results page.
      • These words are unavoidable so most blog posts, if not all, will contain these stop words. So, the search functionality should be able to detect them to provide better results.
    • Able to detect special characters
      • If any of your content contains characters such as “ñ”, “é”, “ü” and etc, your search box should be accommodating of the common spellings.
      • For example, when one searches for Beyonce instead of Beyoncé, the results should be the same.
      • Words with special characters are common among words of German, Spanish, or French origins.
• The Search Box Should Support Predictive Search
  • Predictive search shows suggestions basing on what the user typed on the search box. When this is supported, it helps to…
    • Accelerate the search procedure.
    • Enhance the search quality because it avoids the common misspellings and typos
    • Provide any related content to the keyword.
  • When there are keyword suggestions, it will give the user similar pages related to their search.
  • For example, I will type “dress” and then, the predictive search would suggest things like such as “casual dress”, “cocktail dress”, “maxi dress”, “formal dress”, “summer dress”, and so on.
  • It’s very convenient especially if you are shopping and you have no idea what dress to pick.
  • Some websites add a category option beside the search box. Take Amazon for example, and look at the drop-down next to the search box. You can choose a category on where to find “dress”.
  • Perhaps, you are look for a book on the Kindle Store with the word “dress” on the title. You could also be searching for a “dress” movie on the Amazon Prime section.
  • Lastly, users should also have the option to close the predictive search option. By pressing the ESC key, they should be able to close the suggestion list and type for their desired keywords instead.

If you were to list your direct competitors, you would probably name the top 3 without hesitating.

Are you sure that these companies are your only competitors? Could there be others that could pose as a threat to your business? Seems far-fetched, right?

Well, actually not.

More Than You Think.

• When you hear the word “competitors”, you instantly think about the websites that sell the same products as you. Yes, that is considered competition. However, there’s more to it.
• There are other websites, blog sites, tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram photos, and other social media platforms that compete with you. Once you search a business, you would immediately see the social media pages of these businesses.

Social Media IS Dominating.

• You know what fills the first page of the search engine results page? You are competing with different pages… and YES, EVEN THOSE PAGES UNRELATED TO YOUR BUSINESS!
• The social media, in general, is gaining a lot of following. People are eager to get on these sites. So, if you think it’s not worry because they are not your competition, you still competing against the distant businesses.

Related: Using Social Media to Boost Advocacy

Your Non-Competitors Are Taking the Top Spots.

Of course, other business would go after the same target keywords as you. This fact can’t be avoided.

Several websites would write about a single keywords, and it’s up to you on how you are going to make your content stand out from the rest.

For you, you may not be after the money, but everyone in this field is after the audience. We are all competing to get our target audience.

For example, you are checking for results on “Party Cake Suppliers”. The results are not purely cake businesses. Whether you believe it or not, there are songs about cakes and they take a coveted spot.

Your job is to find ways to unseat them. It does not matter who gets removed as long as you get a chance to take their place.

To prepare for this, you need some oldie but goodie SEO tactics:

• Do keyword research.
• Produce content related to these keywords and terms.
• Edit your content’s title, meta description, URL, and other on-page SEO factors.
• The goal here is to be fully aware of the searcher’s intent.

When they search for “Party Cake Suppliers”, are they looking for cake ingredients to buy? Perhaps, they want to buy a customized cake? Maybe they are merely looking for cake baking tips and are looking for suggested brands?

Related: A List of Important On-Page SEO Elements

The Thing with Social Media.

• Social media is a tricky place because it is the place where everyone can publish any content.
• Even your audience can regularly send out posts. The thing is you are competing with your audience.
• What’s worse is that social media sites always update their algorithms. Your posts won’t been seen by many if no one engages with it.
• User interaction is important for your social posts to be visible. Well, unless you pay for additional boosting then you won’t worry about your posts getting toppled by other social posts.

Create More of What Your Users Want.

The online community is such a competitive world. The only way to be different is to go where you users are. Produce more content based from their needs, interests, and hobbies.

Related: What Is User Engagement and Why Is It Important for SEO?

Why do we need to optimize images? What does it bring to your site?

For starters, when images are optimized, the page loads faster. When a website is fast, rankings would be higher than the usual.

So, we all can safely say that image optimization can lead to higher web rankings. You should never undermine its positive effects to your website.

According to a 2016 Google study, it was proven that web pages loaded with images had lower conversion rates. It’s no surprise because pages filled with images will take long to completely load. No web visitor would like to wait for a long time.

That’s why it is imperative for websites to compress all their images. Below are the tips on editing your images to ensure a fast page load time while maintain a pleasant user experience:

1. To Add an Image or Not to Add?

That is the question. Always check if you really need an image for a web page. Is this particular image essential to the overall web design?

The rise of minimalism is because of the fact that users want to preserve the ideal UX more than the aesthetics. When there are less images, of course, the website will load better and also perform better.

For most web pages, images can’t be avoided. Because for some, these images are the center piece of the whole website.

Instead of focusing on the images to make your website better, you can utilize:

• Vector graphics to simplify logos and other designs.
• Embed the videos and drop the heavy GIFs.

The advantage of vector images is that it has a great resolution when viewed on equally high resolution devices.

Search engines can’t decipher the texts when you add it on images. One way to make sure that Google does not ignore the texts is use web fonts instead.

2. Use Image Compression Tools

Well, you can manually optimize your images. How?

• First tip: resize the image
• Second tip: compress the image

Yes, that can ensure faster page load time. However, when you manually do it, you will finish the image compression after 5 long years.

No, it won’t take years, but you get the point.

There are tools that will help you finish the task faster and make image compression easier.

For WordPress users, install Imagify and you can compress your images immediately. The best part is that the images are saved in your image library. You won’t be needing to upload each one. Thus, it saves you time.

Imagify supports both JPG and PNG image files. It will surely boost your website’s page load speed.

Reminder, a lossy compression may affect the image quality. However, it will reduce your image file size. Images will then be evidently light.

3. Use the Latest Image File Formats

The JPG has a lossy compression while the PNG has a lossless compression.

Basically, these 2 are the fundamental image formats. Did you know there are newer image formats?

These are: JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP. These formats preserves the original aspect ratios. Thus, you are sure that pages will load faster on mobile phones.

However, the downside is that WebP is the only format supported by Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

In part 1, I already gave you 5 tips in improving your user engagements. This time, I will give you 5 more tips in increasing user engagements.

If you think that you need to do a review on the basics of user engagements, just click on the topic and you will redirected to the page. If you are all set, then, let’s go through the tips mentioned below.

• Suggest a Related Post & Provide Links to Other Blog Post.

Aid people in finding content related to their search, and the best way to do this is by linking other blog post. For example, this post is about user engagement, I’m going to link the user engagement stats to closely monitor.

Link related topics together so that the readers can easily access them without having to manually search for all these interconnected topics. So, every time you talk about something, don’t forget to add a link.

• Don’t Forget to Add a Search Option.

Of course, you can’t just link everything in one post, right? Let your web visitors find what they are looking for. They can refer to your website’s search function once they need to look for a specific post.

Having a search option satisfies your users. It allows them to find and select the appropriate solution for their problems. If they can’t find anything relevant to their topic, then, they would surely abandon your site. You totally missed the opportunity to satisfy their needs, and they will choose to find a better solution somewhere else.

• Obvious Call-to-Action Buttons to Assist Customers for the Next Step

Yes, your website is there for people to purchase your products and services. However, you just don’t shove it on their faces right away. There should be a process, and you need to provide information about the product first.

Then, that is the time that you will slowly convince them to buy. Don’t be in a hurry in getting to the “buy” part because your web visitors need some vital information first. If they don’t know the product, why would they buy it?

Every website should inform their users first, and then, direct them to the page they want. From there, it’s easy to convince them to buy your products just provide the necessary CTAs.

Related: Web Design Features That Increases Sales

• Add a Chat Feature.

Sometimes, the search option is not enough. Users won’t find the answer they need no matter how they search your site. If they can’t locate what they need, it’s also convenient to include a chat option to offer more assistance to your users.

You can also have an automated bot to filter out the queries. Just compile the frequently asked questions and provide the standard script on how to solve this issue. Whether you wish to implement a live chat or an automated chat, it’s really up to your business goals.

• Acquire Email Addresses and Engage Through Email.

Lastly, how do you convince people to return to your site? Easy! You email them about the latest updates about your website.

It’s easier to find customers since you already have their email. You can send out surveys and keep them updated about the latest deals. So, don’t forget to obtain the email addresses of your web visitors and provide content they want so they will always come back for more.

Related: Increase Conversion Through Emotional Appeal