Search engine optimisation is one of, if not, the most crucial part to a website – it is was decides how much traffic the website gets and can work both as a catalyst to improving/reducing organic traffic and ranking. For this reason, lots of time is spent by website owners to continually improve their SEO prescence, to increase the traffic going to it from search engines.

With this, there are many many ways you can improve the SEO of a website, with each having a different impact to the overall organic health to the website. For those that are looking to rank their websites higher in search engines, here are three overlooked elements to a have in a website to gain good SEO.

#1 https://

Although this news is a few years old, there are still websites out there that do not have SSL certifications for their website. An SSL certificate is a way of obtaining a secure connection from the host to the web user’s computer, making browsing the internet a lot safer and harder to gain information from the web user and their computer. An SSL certificate is made clear from the domain having ‘https://’ rather than ‘http://’.

How this relates to SEO comes from the fact that Google, since mid-2014, have started to use SSL certificates as a ranking tool for websites. Therefore, if you haven’t got an SSL certificate yet for your website, get one as soon as possible.

Google use an SSL certificate as a ranking signal

#2 Clear up 303s and 404s

Some people will argue that 303 and 404 errors do not affect the SEO of a website. However, if you have an article for which you are ranking for on search engines and then the slug of the URL changes for ‘x’ or ‘y’ reasons, those that click onto the link will hit a 404 page.

The user experience one has with your websites will impact the SEO of your website and content. Therefore, check your 303 and 404 errors in Google’s search engine console and use appropriate redirections on the errors that need it.

#3 Reduce the Exit Rate

Moving on from the point produced from point #2, the user experience one has with your website will impact the SEO of your website and the content on it. For example, if you have content for which the web user exits back onto search engine results seconds after landing onto the page, it tells Google straight away that the web user did not find the content that useful to them. For this reason, Google has an arguement for ranking your content even lower down the results page.

With this in mind, always work to make sure the exit rate associated with your content is as low as possible. This can be done by:

• Improving the design of your website, such as having more of the article’s content above the fold.
• Caching your website’s pages to improve time to load pages.
• Improve the quality of your content – make it more useful to the web user.