At the very least, you need to stay at the top of your internet game. In fact, ideally, you should be slightly ahead of the internet game in general. Achieving this means regularly taking time to think about how to enhance your website. Then you need to act on your thoughts.
How to enhance my website
If you’re looking for ways to enhance your website, there are five key areas you should check. These are as follows. Confirm your website reflects your main goal. Improve security. Review mobile-friendliness. Ditch stock photography. Implement social share buttons.
Confirm your website reflects your main goal
You can have several goals for your website, but, by definition, you can only have one main goal. This has to be kept front and center at all times. It’s absolutely fine to change your main goal, but if you do then you need to check your whole website to make sure that all pages reflect this. It’s also fine to have additional goals, just make sure that they complement your main goal rather than set up competition for it.
Improve security
These days, the golden rule of website management is that if you can find something which will enhance the security of your website, you should implement it as quickly as possible.
Right now, the reason for this is more “stick” than “carrot”. If your site is compromised, there is a very good chance that it will be blacklisted by Google and even if you get it unblocked, you may find that your search rankings are impacted.
Even now, however, the browsers and search engines are starting to look for ways to reward sites that implement robust security. For example, sites that use HTTPS can be given a ranking boost. At present, this is a fairly minor one, but it may grow in the future.
Review mobile-friendliness
At this point, mobile-friendliness is arguably not an enhancement, it’s non-negotiable. The whole topic of mobile-friendliness is far too big to cover in any depth here, however much of it revolves around three key points.
Generally, mobile devices have relatively small screens. There is some nuance here in that tablet screens can be comparable with laptop screens, but laptops have separate keyboards, so the difference does become more noticeable when you start typing. Smartphones have much smaller screens. This means that you need to think about how your content works when someone is viewing it in miniature.
Mobile devices are often operated with one hand. This means that controls need to be really easy to operate. For example, buttons need to be large, hyperlinks clearly differentiated, and lists easy to swipe through.
People on mobile devices are more likely to use voice search, so it’s worth thinking about what this could mean for your website. As a bonus, this will also make your website easier for voice-activated assistants (Alexa, Siri, Cortana, etc) to search.
Ditch stock photography
Including stock photography in an article doesn’t, currently, have a direct impact on your search engine results, at least not on Google. It may, however, have an indirect impact. The reason for this is that stock photography is instantly recognizable as such. This is largely because, by its very nature, it has to be generic. Another word for generic is bland and bland content, of any sort, is boring, especially when so many popular stock images are used by so many different sites.
Boring content is not going to generate a lot of user engagement and it’s certainly not going to be liked and shared on social media. Ideally, you should use only original images on your website. If, however, this is too expensive, then at least use original photography for your key content.
When you do use stock imagery, make sure that it at least has a clear tie-in to your content, rather than just being there because you think having images will improve your search results.
Implement social share buttons
Having content shared on social media can give your search rankings a major boost, so make it easy for users to do so by implementing social share buttons. Rather than adding a social share button for every possible social media site, you might want to think about limiting the options to the sites best suited to your content and/or the sites on which you are most eager to get exposure.
If you want your content to be shared, then try to add an explicit call to action to request the user to do so.
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