When you’ve breezed through your search engine optimization (SEO) basics, it’s time to take your SEO knowledge to the next level. Keep reading to discover SEO tips you might have never heard before—but that will get your website to Google’s top spot.
But first: What is SEO?
The SEO Guide from Higher Visibility details the key pointers any SEO marketer should remember.
SEO is the process of increasing a website’s organic ranking in a search engine’s search results page (SERP) for the purpose of increasing web traffic.
The higher a website ranks in SERP, the more likely people visit that website. “Organic ” search results refer to search results that aren’t paid advertisements.
Ranking high on SERP requires the utilization of several techniques, some of which are well-spread in the marketing world today. These strategies include identifying and using the right keywords; crafting eye-catching headlines; and linking to pages within your website and to sites that search engines deem as “trustworthy.”
These techniques are crucial to ranking on Google or Yahoo, but if every other business is doing them, too, then how will your brand stand out? Check out these unusual tips to propel your site to the number 1 spot on your favorite search engine.
How to Improve SEO Ranking?
1. Write for people, not for bots
One common mistake businesses make is producing content for the sole purpose of SEO ranking. They stuff their articles with keywords and use convoluted sentence phrasing to lengthen their posts.
This practice goes against the very purpose of SEO: helping people identify the websites and web pages that will provide them with the most informative and well-written content on a topic.
Your business should invest in excellent content for two reasons. The first is: search engines don’t buy your products or avail your services. Content writing is not just great marketing; it’s also customer service. Articles should inform and entertain people, not just exist for site crawlers.
The second reason you should invest in good writers is that search engines won’t rank you anyway if you don’t. Maybe keyword stuffing worked five years ago, but search engines have become smarter. They can identify duplicate content and badly-written articles. If you’re going to venture into content production, might as well do it right.
2. Compress your images
Site speed is crucial to a brand’s SEO efforts. Slow websites discourage visitors from browsing—if they even stay long enough to see the site landing page. There are several ways to increase a website’s speed, such as upgrading your website hosting package and limiting the use of videos and effects on your pages. However, one often-overlooked technique is compressing images.
Logos, for instance, often don’t occupy more than a few hundred pixels on your site. If you upload a photo that’s 1000 x 1000 pixels, the server loads that whole image, even if the site displays only a fraction of that size.
To reduce file size, remove images’ EXIF data and use online tools like JPEGmini, jpeg.io or Kraken.io to downsize your photo’s size.
3. Skip the pop-up ads
Pop-up advertisements that invite visitors to join mailing lists or avail a product sale are not only annoying; they also impede on your SEO efforts.
Google at the beginning of January 2017 said that, web pages might not rank as high as they should if their information is not immediately accessible to visitors. This declaration points squarely at pop-up ads which cover most, if not the whole, web page on the first visit. Worse are the pop-up ads whose close buttons are hidden or made difficult to find.
There are other ways of alerting visitors about your awesome whitepaper or crazy sale. Here are just some of them:
- Use a banner. Place a banner ad at the top or at the bottom of your web page. These locations are unobtrusive but still eye-catching.
- Place call-to-actions strategically. Put in call-to-action (CTA) buttons in your blog posts. CTA buttons work best after every thousand words and/or at the end of an article.
- Use in-text hyperlinks. Sometimes, the more subtle an advertisement, the better the engagement it gets. Include links in blog posts when they’re applicable; just make sure they don’t sound too forced, or that’ll defeat the purpose.
Bottom Line
Everyone is investing SEO — and you should, too. But if everyone is trying to stand out, then you need to go above and beyond the usual tactics businesses use.
By investing in informative content tailored to your audience; speeding up your website; and being more accommodating toward user experience, you can be sure that both search engines and customers will love your website.
Just remember: SEO isn’t just about ranking on Google; it’s really about bringing the best experience to your customers.
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