The SEO world is forever changing and evolving. Every year, the major search engines make additions, changes, and improvements to their search algorithms. An SEO technique or strategy that was highly effective one year, may not be as effective the following year.
If your site has started to stall, since last year, and you’re on the lookout for new ways to improve your site’s visibility in the search engines, then you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we will be looking at some of the better SEO techniques that you can use to either improve or maintain your current organic rankings. Covering both advanced and relatively basic SEO methods to increase SEO ranking services.
1. Optimise Your Content
For the vast majority of webmasters, SEO simply involves creating and publishing content on a regular basis, while targeting keywords, and getting new links to their site.
But the most experienced SEO practitioners know that it’s possible to increase their site’s visibility in the search engines simply by optimizing the content that already exists on their site. This is done through a process called content optimization.
With content optimization, the primary aim is to improve a page’s on-site metrics using the following methods:
- Make sure your content isn’t too thin.
- Ensuring your articles are readable.
- Have both primary and secondary keywords for your articles.
- Utilizing both META title and description tags.
2. Qualify Your Outbound Links
Does your website have outbound links pointing to your various pages, in the form of forum links or blog comments?
Do you have any sponsored link opportunities on your site, which you can use to generate revenue from?
If there exists any links on your site that you would prefer the search engine ignored, you can do that, by using the rel=”nofollow” attribute within the link. Google makes it possible for you to qualify all your links by using the following methods
- Rel=”ugc” – this tag is used for links that exist within user-generate content, such as forum posts, reviews, blog comments etc.
- Rel=”sponsored” – this tag should be used for paid links, which are used for generating income through advertisement.
3. Build a Mobile-Friendly Site
For most businesses nowadays, having a website that is responsive or mobile-friendly, is no longer a luxury, but rather a requirement.
So why build a responsive/mobile-friendly site?
There are several reasons why you want your site to be mobile-friendly. These include the following:
- Over 50% of all web surfers, access the internet through their mobile device.
- Close to 40% of all online transactions occur on a mobile device.
- The major search engines, such as Google, have already adopted a mobile-first approach to indexing and crawling websites. This means, the search bots look at your site from the perspective of a mobile device, rather than a desktop machine.
You want your site to be responsive, not only because it’d be looked upon favourably by the search engines, but also, because so many people use mobile devices to browse the web.
4. Implement an Internet Linking Methodology
Whether your site is large to small, it must have some kind of internal linking structure or process for it to take full advantage of SEO.
So why should you go with an internal linking process?
A search bot or crawler can be looked at as a kind of cyber vacuum. While a crawler does the typical indexing of new pages while roaming the internet. A robot vacuum cleans the floors and patrols the home.
When your site has no internal linking structure, this acts like a closed door, stopping the robot vacuum from navigating the website. You want to provide your crawler with all the avenues that it needs, to get in and around your website. When looking at SEO, your website will rely on search bots to be able to get around your site and index your new pages.
If the bots are unable to do that, then your new pages will not appear in the search engine results, which means no clicks to your pages, and no sales, organic traffic, revenue, leads or whatever you hope to get from your site. Additionally, creating an internal linking structure can also benefit your site in the following ways:
- It can help to demonstrate the value or relevance of older and new articles on your site.
- It will pass link authority (or juice) from more authoritative pages, like the home page, to newly created pages.
- Relations between your various pages are established by your link structure.
This is why, no matter how large or small your website is, you’ll want to have this in check, especially if you want to get the most out of your SEO efforts.
5. Content That Is Voice Assistant-Friendly
Are you someone that writes just like they speak? It’s possible you do, when you’re on an instant messaging services such as WhatsApp, but most likely not, when you’re writing something for work. Do you search in the major search engines, like Google, the same way you speak? Again, most likely not.
However, with the introduction of new voice assistant services, that is no longer an issue. Today, around 4.2 billion voice assistant services are used, all over the world, with this number set to double, in a couple of years. Searching the internet has become a more conversational, fluent and complex process. With this new conversational search engine world we’re heading to, it’s important that your content is optimised for voice searching.
6. Accelerate Your Site Speed
Like with many aspects of SEO, page speed is one that serves as both a ranking factor for the search engines and a user experience metrics for the end user.
So why should you improve your site speed?
People want the sites they visit to be fast and responsive, which is something Google focuses a great deal on. This is why site speed is a ranking factor, for Google, and the other major search engines.
The average web surfer expects a page to load up within 2 seconds. If your website is unable to meet this benchmark, then it will become uncompetitive in the search engines listing. This is one technique that you can and should work on today.
Even if the vast majority of your sites content comes from alternative avenues, such as paid ads and social media, it’s still important that you provide a quick and responsive experience. If not, then people will leave your site, and go to your competitor’s site.
Page speed is one area of SEO that many companies tend to overlook. However, improving the speed of your site by one-second can have a massive impact on your sites UX. And you can also expect a massive boost in conversions.
AUTHOR INFO
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk.
