How great was it when you first saw your website on the first page of search results after a query? The first page of Google results is highly coveted real estate, a place where every website wants to appear. Having good search engine visibility doesn’t come overnight, and it takes a lot of time and effort to get there. But the fact that it takes plenty of work to build search engine rankings doesn’t mean that it’s too complicated. There are several simple things you can do with your website to improve its visibility, even though the improvements will not be visible right away. Here is a couple you should try.

  1. High-Quality Content

There’s nothing like good content to put your website on the map. Whether you are creating audio, video, photo, or text content, or any combination of the four, you will have to create it so that it’s able to compete against other similar pieces of content on the web.

During content creation, it’s important to keep in mind that relevance and value are the two things every piece of content needs to have. Your content needs to be relevant to the needs of your audience, and it needs to provide them some value. If it does that, Google and other search engines will like your content a lot.

  1. Up-to-Date Content

Keeping your content up-to-date is so important that it gets its own separate spot on this list. Updating content regularly isn’t just maintenance work you should see as a part of the content creation process.

Content is an asset with a partially limited lifespan. It’s possible to create content that will stay relevant for years. More often, however, you will need to update your content so that it reflects new developments in your field or industry. Updating content to prolong its useful life means you’re making the most out of your advertising dollars.

  1. Pay Attention to Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Don’t overlook title tags and meta descriptions. It might seem like they are only useful once you got the coveted spot on the first page of results. And even though that is their function, it’s not all title tags and meta descriptions do.

Title tags and meta descriptions are important signals of content relevance for search engines. They are also a common spot to place your keywords. And, if they do their work well and make people click on your articles, they solidify your content’s connection with the search terms.

  1. SEO Your Images

You can do some SEO work on the photo content you post to your website. It’s a quick and easy task that might add a bit to your pages’ chances of getting a good spot in the search results.

Some of the things you could do are title the image with titles that include keywords. An image description can be very useful, as could image tags. And that’s all you need to do.

  1. Make Your Content Easy to Share

Shareability is a big deal when it comes to content and its ability to rank well in search engine results. But even if you discard that, shareability is still important as an alternative way to get your content in front of an audience.

Good content does its part for shareability. But you can give the visitors a nudge by including social share buttons on your website’s pages. The very least you can do is make it as easy as possible to share your content.

  1. Have a Functional Website

The worst thing your website can be in terms of visibility is unavailable. A website with a lot of downtimes is a bad website. So is a website with links leading nowhere is a bad website. And no matter how awesome you designed your website error pages, people will not like seeing them often.

Your website needs to work at a very basic level. That means having 99.9% uptime. It also means that redirects should be in place and that dead links should be few and far between.

  1. Improve Loading Speeds

This is a big one. A website that loads slowly is a nightmare that decreases conversion rates, increases bounce rates, and simply hurts the user experience, especially on mobile devices. There is no excuse for having a slow-loading website.

What are the things you can do? For one, you can start with ensuring the images you host on the website are not too large. The hosting package needs to be adequate for the task. You should get rid of any useless plugins you’re using for the website. And once you’d done this, look into even more ways to speed up your website. It’s one of the most important things you can do to improve its performance its visibility.