If you want to rank high in search engines with your website, there is no better way to do so by doing SEO. SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. This is not a new concept for any digital marketing company today, but the techniques and methods of executing this concept are subjective. There are no certain set rules for doing SEO. For example, there was a time when the only way to improve the organic ranking was through targeted keywords. Today, other factors need to be considered as well. So, what are the best techniques of SEO that would get you a higher ranking in search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo?
1. Improve Your Website Speed
On 9th April 2010, Google took site speed as a vital factor to rank a website high in search engines. What does this mean? Well, to put it simply, if your website speed is slow you won’t stand a chance to get even close to a high organic listing. A web-page with faster loading speed is more preferable because it reduces the operational costs (if your page needs long to load, it probably consumes a lot of data) and enhances user experience (the faster a page loads, the happier a customer is).
According to studies, more than 40% internet users prefer those websites that take 3 or less than 3 secs to load. A site which is even 1 sec slow can cost 7% loss in the conversions. Don’t get a shock, but it is important to know that very slow websites even lose 80% visitors while they are loading. There is lots you can do to speed up your website. The Google Search Console shows very well, which areas of your page need working to improve your search engine rankings. Sometimes its about reducing the weight of the pictures (by i.e. using website plugins or external pages like tinypng.com), sometimes your website code is unnecessarily long and can be reduced (we can help with that).
2. Improve the Out-Linking Quality
Moz founder, Rand Fishkin, said, “Linking out sends trackable traffic. Other websites will notice the influence of your link to their page visitors and visit your page in return. Maybe you offer a service they’re interested in contracting, or it makes your site a more valuable and scalable resource they like to link to as well.”
You can see the importance of good quality out-linking. A link is like a personal reference to Google, when you link somewhere, you recommend a page. It creates a trust score for Google and benefits in getting higher search engine rankings. So always create vital out-links to other websites, which are somehow related to your content or your business category. Make sure that your outbound links are set to open in a new window, so when users click on them, they will not leave your site behind.
3. Get Inbound Links From Authentic Websites
Linking out is not the only way to get organic ranking, this is a two-way process. If you are making outbound links, do try to build authentic inbound links from trustworthy sites. Be it a no-follow link or do-follow link, both have importance at their respective places. The decent combination of these two kinds of links would get you a Google-rewarded, natural link profile. Craft effective content useful enough to link to other authoritative websites, spread it over social media or newsletters and at the end, you will find other websites link to yours accordingly. A strong link structure, both within your own website and in and out of your website, are important factors for Google if you want to rank high in search engines.
4. Create Quality and Engaging Content
The saying “Content is king” is quite true when you aim at a higher Google rank. Content plays a crucial role in the organic ranking of any website, maybe even more than ever. Creating quality and rich content indeed holds a prominent place in major SEO tips and techniques. One thing that many people forget is to focus on one or two keywords when writing – simply including them in the title, URL and a couple of times in the text you’re writing makes a big difference to Google. But merely producing the content is not sufficient. There should be consistency in producing and posting the content on a website.
It is also essential for you because it would give good signals to the Google and to its algorithm in terms of the “Fresh Factor”. Google regularly checks your page to see if you have new (fresh) content, so unique content and consistent content posting of the same, all these things together make a big difference. These factors enhance the freshness score and induce the search engine to rank your website higher in the search results. For some businesses, it seems more difficult to produce new content regularly, but this might be a chance to outwit your competition. If you don’t have time to regularly update your content, you can get someone else to do that for you.
5. Fortify Your Social Signals
Building strong social signals play an important role when you talk about the most important SEO tips and strategies. You may not have given thought on managing and building your social presence, but for most businesses this is an easy way to reach greater brand awareness. Though it is not official from Google that it’s algorithm takes social factors into consideration, yet there are many cases and studies that have proved that social signals do play a significant role in reaching a higher rank in search engines. Especially the numbers of shares seems to be important, as they have the same significance to Google as a link = a personal recommendation.
Start focusing on your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked-In, and Youtube (if you’re not sure, which channel is right for you, get in touch with us). Do regular posting with attractive and engaging content like banners, quotes, polls or infographics and link to your website. You will see the difference very soon. Some SEO tips and strategy for augmenting social signals are host various polls and contests for more engagement (these posts are usually shared well), induce your audience to share your content (by telling them to do so) and crafting useful content that’s worth sharing. If it fits to your business, try to mention social media giants or influencers in your social posts.
6. Some More Quick SEO Tips
Last but not least, we have a handful of other tips that prove to be very influential to Google when you want to obtain a higher rank in search engines. Make sure that your websites gets indexed on search engines by submitting the XML-sitemap to Google (when the page is new) and setting your robots.txt URLs on “Allow” so all your pages get indexed. The proper use of the keyword in images can do miracles, as your pictures will show up better in the Google image search. Plus, if your office picture is named law-firm-southbank-office.jpg, it helps Google to read and understand your website code better (instead of when the picture is named img01735.jpg).
If your website is not mobile-friendly, you should definitely invest in adapting your template or doing a redesign. More than 30% of users nowadays use mobile devices to access websites, tendency increasing, and if your website is not displayed well or difficult to use on the small screens, you might miss out on a third of possible conversions. If you are in a niche business, do not forget your niche. Stick to it and offer best on it, because with great content and a continuous promotion of your content over different channels, you can get to the top of your niche easily.
In this post, we discussed the 5 best tips for SEO that really improve your ranking in search engines. SEO is no exact science and the hundreds of ranking factors continuously change – but some of them have always and will always play an important role in the next years. Follow our tips for a higher rank in search engines, they will harness more traffic to your website and help you to avoid Google penalties.
