Optimize for Voice Search and Natural Language to Improve Your Website Ranking

The voiced results are actual results that show up on featured snippets. A voice is more efficient at fetching sophisticated results so it is important that you include well-structured content that can be understood quickly by your visitors and the search engines. Keep in mind that if you have a good organic ranking, you have a better chance to get a featured snippet plus the added benefit of your site being read out on the search engine.

Perhaps you are wondering what the fuss is about voice search. Did you know that voice input is four times quicker than typing? This means 4X faster results. Of course, there will be some accessibility hiccups. Some internet users encounter challenges typing on particular devices while others are prone to confusing menus. All in all, no matter how mobile-friendly your educational site is, or the size of the phones used to access it, mobile searches can be a little awkward to use. Google has been working hard to improve its search box so it can comprehend better the superlatives, complex combinations, points in time, and ordered items.

So, if you want to optimize your web page for voice search, you need to produce content with more direct answers to the commonly asked questions. Focus on answering queries that are asked more in natural language than what is normally put into a search engine through typing whereby keyword dominate.

Answer a Question

Another important aspect of search engine marketing is the ability to answer questions directly with your content. Google extracts data from third-party websites so as to display searches with more accurate on SERP answers to knowledge-based questions. While Wikipedia, where you can check for plagiarism online, dominates in the search boxes, Google still recognizes quality content from other publishers. As a website owner, consider what questions your website can answer and then create information based on that. It pays to be as precise as possible. You can, for instance, phrase a query on the H1 tag and give answers immediately. Sometimes, you will need to pay to get to the top. But you still need high-quality content if you are into product listing ads space. But your ads don’t always come first in the new SERPs.

Have you considered getting your educational website in Google News? Start getting into top stories and implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). This is an assured way to drive traffic in the short-term. If you can come up with hot stories from the presses, you will be able to answer the burning questions of internet users at the time when those stories are trending. It would also be a great benefit if other sites link to your blog as a source of the current information.

Top stories are like the ‘News’ section of a desktop setting. This section is being replaced by AMP. AMP allows webmasters to create very quick and instant loading versions of web pages that mobile users find convenient. AMP is not a ranking signal but if your site appears on Top Stories as opposed to AMP, you will be able to answer most questions by mobile users.

Website Speed

While AMP can help to speed up your web marketing on mobile devices, it is not always the best option for speeding up your website. Generally, AMP is only a quick fix and not a permanent solution. Do not underestimate the effects of website speed on conversion rate, traffic, and revenue. According to research carried out by Akamai, 47% of internet users expect websites to load in two seconds or less. 47% will leave a page that takes over three seconds to open. Basically, speed affects the following aspects of your site:

• Sales
• Conversions
• Reputation
• Traffic and page views

Are you ready to increase the speed of your site? Here are important takeaways.

These extensions can have negative effects on your site in ways you never imagined. It is especially true if you have a blog under content management systems, such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. The number of plugins you have installed on your website is not all that matters. Their quality does. You may have 50 plugins and your site will load faster than if it had 10 crappy plugins. A good rule of thumb is to avoid any plugin that loads numerous styles and scripts or those that do a lot of remote requests or add extra database questions to all your website pages. While add-ons may improve the performance of your website, it is imperative that you apply only those that are absolutely necessary. For instance, you might want to use P3 for a WordPress site.

1. Eliminate unnecessary add-ons and plugins

   These extensions can have negative effects on your site in ways you never imagined. It is especially true if you have a blog under content management systems, such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. The number of plugins you have installed on your website is not all that matters. Their quality does. You may have 50 plugins and your site will load faster than if it had 10 crappy plugins. A good rule of thumb is to avoid any plugin that loads numerous styles and scripts or those that do a lot of remote requests or add extra database questions to all your website pages. While add-ons may improve the performance of your website, it is imperative that you apply only those that are absolutely necessary. For instance, you might want to use P3 for a WordPress site.

2. Minimize social sharing buttons

   There is no need to install 99 social sharing buttons on a site. They end up confusing your visitors. The truth is most social share buttons use JavaScript which is very slow meaning that it will be reducing traffic on your site. There are many cases of social media sites like Facebook outage that affects the speed of websites on which they are installed. So, your best bet is to remove or limit those buttons. You may also synchronize them in a way that they will load asynchronously such that an outage of a certain social media network doesn’t slow down your pages. Asynchronous delivery prevents loss of speed in case of a server outage or a delay in your Ad network.

3. Enable Expires Headers

   The server response time plays the biggest role when it comes to site speed. More requests on the server slow down your website. With Expires Headers, your visitors will know when to look for certain information from your server as opposed to their browser cache. If they request files say once per month, it will minimize commotions on your site and HTTP requests on your server thereby improving the speed.

4. Enable Caches

   Caches guarantee faster experience on your site by preserving a version of your site on the visitors’ browsers. Statistics indicate that caching reduces load time by 1.5 seconds. Depending on what platform your site is based on, there are many ways to enable caches. If you have a WordPress site consider adding these plugins: W3 Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.

5. CDN

   Websites generally load fast within the country where their servers are located. Also, visitors using VPN services can access the sites quick. Otherwise, people from other countries might find the sites loading too slowly. This issue can be solved by using Content Delivery Network. CDN distributes your web pages across multiple servers in various countries so that the users are served equally. This, in turn, increases the speed of your site.

6. Find a good Web Host

   Have you tried everything to boost your site speed but to no avail? It’s high time you switch to a dedicated web host. Most cheap servers have poor services, so you should choose a good web hosting company to boost speed.

7. Change your website theme

   The theme of your site can have a big effect on the speed. Even the most effective server configuration cannot save your website if you have a crappy theme featuring bloated codes. Before you pick a theme, investigate its performance first. Don’t just look at the aesthetics because they are deceptive.

8. Google Page Speed module

   This is an open-source module which maximizes the speed of your site by modifying the server files and applying the best techniques without making you do extra work. If you have sufficient knowledge, you may install the module yourself or ask a web developer to do it for you.

9. Minimize and optimize images

   Images that are not optimized for Google are very heavy and consume a lot of data while loading. Don’t add images that are more than 1.5mbs.

10. Avoid image hotlinking

    This is also known as inline linking. It is the practice of linking to a photo from another site rather than uploading it directly on your server. While it can save your bandwidth, it slows down the speed on your site especially when the site you have hotlinked is having a downtime.

Bio

Nicole Lewis is an SEO expert with almost a decade of experience. He started as a Software QA engineer back in 2009. After one year of working with Oracle, he developed an interest in search engine optimization and decided to start his own web development company. Since then, he has been helping websites rank high on Google. Today he is the SEO manager of various educational sites including EduBirdie.

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