Creating a website nowadays is easy, making it look pretty should be no problem, but helping it rank higher on search engines is another story. If you’re new to this topic, this guide will help you focus on clear and specific ways to fill your pages with rich SEO content and end up ranking higher on Google searches.
1. Fill All of Your Meta Descriptions and Alt Images
In a virtual world crammed with websites, it’s only natural that you’ll find thousands of pages similar to yours in content and even design. So how do you get your website to be the one people want to open up? The first step is to get them to find it quicker, and that’s what meta descriptions and all metadata is for. When creating each individual page, you have to think that it will show in search engines like a tiny window that displays a bit of info about the whole content. Meta descriptions are clear and appealing descriptions of the content of your page, that should make people get what they’ll find inside and be eager to click.
On a similar note, image alts are brief descriptions that accompany your visual content (images or videos). Alts (alternative text) is particularly useful when a visitor has a text-only browser or, when someone does image search on an engine.
2. Use Long Tail Keywords and Place Them Naturally
At this point you might know what keywords are. These tiny bits of information are used for search engines to find your website as a response to a user’s specific search. Unless your website runs on a very rare and unique field, chances are the main, or general keywords of your brand, have a very tough competition (this is the case for any retail business that has to compete with major retailers). What we recommend in this case is to rely on long tail keywords. What are those? Long tail keywords, also known as keyword phrases, are a set of words that describe a concept and are far more specific than just one word. So, if you’re selling jeans, you’re more likely to make your website rank higher with the keyword “high-waisted jeans” than just “jeans”.
Another important aspect of keywords is how to use them. Finding the right keyword is half the work, but it won’t do anything for you unless you know how to place it in titles, subheadings and content, and do so naturally. While SEO is a big deal, readability and coherence are still far more important to both search engines and users.
3. Create High Quality Content Only
Creating content is not as simple as you’d think. There are many aspects to consider because the main goal, when you’re writing for a blog and creating visuals to place in your website, is to bring something valuable to your visitors, as well as something that makes them want more from you.
In addition to having a captivating title that invites people to click, you must make sure the content of your text meets all SEO recommendations, such as a low number of passive sentences, short phrases and several paragraphs for easier reading, a fair amount of keyword density and, of course, the length of your pieces. Several tech-studies have proven that articles with at least 1500 words get more backlinks and social interactions, so you can prepare your content in a rich and detailed manner rather than brief and poorly developed
As for your consistency? It’s always better to work on a schedule and make sure to publish fresh content regularly, as well as update or improve previous content consistently to make it bounce up in rankings.
Related: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide to Boost Sales
4. Place Valuable Links on Relevant Content
Placing links sounds like a no-brainer, but there’s actually several things you must take into consideration before working on a link strategy (because there is such a thing). To create valuable links that really tell people what they’ll find once they click on it, make sure to place your links on the words related to the destination URL, this way the user won’t get an unpleasant surprise by clicking and realizing that’s not the content they were hoping to see. On a similar note, you must send your users to a page where they’ll find only relevant and useful content. For example, if you’re talking about fitness, you have better chances of creating a relevant link by sending them to some low-carb recipes than sending them to a “fishing how-to” post.
5. Create High Quality Backlinks to Your Website
It’s a big deal when you manage to get a good quality website that’s doing everything right to rank higher on search engines. But you know what’s even better than that? When other pages or users recognize the quality of your content and make sure to let others know. Quality backlinks are created when another website or blog uses some of your content and creates a hyperlink to drive users to your website.
And while they’re not exactly backlinks, creating internal links from your own website can also help you distribute page hierarchy and increase rankings by supporting your content on more content of your creation.
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Help Users Last Longer on Your Site
One of the things that can severely harm your ranking position in search engines is when a user clicks on your website and lasts just a few seconds before going back to search results or closes your tab. When this happens, Google is receiving a clear message that your website has no relevant content, or nothing useful to offer to readers, and bumps your website to the bottom of results. This is known as a bounce rate, and in terms of Google Analytics a normal bounce rate can range between 41-55%, the optimal numbers being 26-40%. (This number can vary greatly depending on your type of business and website).
You can help users stay on your website for longer and avoid higher bounce rates if you have relevant information that’s EASY TO READ, you make sure to include high quality content, video and images that actually support your content, a fully functioning website with great, yet minimalistic design (remember, less is more). In addition to this your website must have only relevant interlinks placed in the right context, they must have great readability scores and you should always strive for a faster website speed.
Related: 8 Proven Google Ads Tips to Increase Your Conversion Rate
- Make Your Website as Fast as Possible
According to expert studies, even a 1 second delay in loading a website can cost you 7% of conversions. Website loading speed is so important that 40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. With such alarming numbers, you now understand the importance of keeping your page fast and light.
There are several things you can do to help your website be faster, including deactivating useless plugs, decluttering your menu, removing unnecessary 3rd party scripts and lowering the size of all of your images (optimization).
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Use Google Console and Google Analytics
It would be useless to follow the tips on this post if you have nothing to tell you exactly how your website is doing before and after implementing changes. That’s exactly why you need metric tools, and we can’t think of a better option than Google Console and Google Analytics. Create an account and you’ll have access to custom performance reports that tell you which pages are driving the highest amounts of traffic, the geographic location of your audiences, how much time people spent on your website and even the keywords where you’re ranking on search engines. You might even find out you are ranking with keywords you don’t keep track of.
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Create Only Readable and Meaningful URLs
The URLs of your website are just as important as the title and meta description. You want to make sure every corner of your website is used to let search engines know what your content’s about. Keeping this in mind, every time you create a new page make sure the URL matches the title of the page and it includes at least one of your desired keywords. Stay away from unnecessary numbers, dashes and capital letters.
Related: 25 Helpful Tips to Get More Website Traffic
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Add Your Social Media
Even though Google has yet to include social media interactions as a factor to rank higher on search engines, the truth is several case studies have found that content that has been shared, liked and commented on social media actually does rank higher. In order to keep a close relationship between all your social media platforms and your website, make sure that all of your content is share-friendly. Include “share buttons” an all of your pages and encourage people to go to your website when they’re on a social platform and vice versa. Social media can be a useful extension of your website.
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Ad “What is” Definitions to Your Posts
Remember that search engines exist only to help websites reach their ultimate consumer: people. And people don’t really search for information according to SEO standards, they search like any regular person would ask a question. You can be one step ahead of your competitors by realizing people need answering to “what is” questions. That way you’re tackling what audiences want to know and placing complex keywords in search engines.
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Make Sure your Website is Indexed in Search Engines
Why is indexing your website necessary? Because search engines typically need your information in order to correctly display the most relevant results to audiences or users. Indexing is a way of solidifying all the hard work you’ve put into your SEO. You can index your website by XML sitemaps, using Meta Robots, or with Robots.txt to allow massively for your pages to be indexed. As a matter of fact, you should make sure the content of your website has been indexed individually rather than the whole website only.
Related: 8 Website Design Tricks to Improve Your Site’s Conversion Rate
There you have it! You might’ve found out that you need to work on the quality of your content, you need to remember that keywords come first, you need to get rid of unnecessary functions in your website or even strengthen your social media game. The truth is all of these tips are valuable because using them all will help you build a solid strategy that focuses on your users and how likely they are to come back to your website.
