10 Ways to Improve Your SEO Efforts
A key part of promoting your web page is to get it listed by the search engines. The higher the position of your web page in the search results of these search engines you achieve, the higher will be the traffic and the amount of clicks you will get. An important method for attaining good rankings in search results is search engine optimization. It will have your website indexed by search engines. This is made possible by optimizing the content on-page and building important links to it. Google has an algorithm that is dynamically and constantly changing to consider search engine optimization factors. The top ten factors that are helpful in improving your SEO campaign are:
Keyword Research
When you want to optimize your website, it is important that the web content is rich in keywords. Writing down keywords will carry no weight if those keywords are not used in the search terms commonly by web viewers. Various tools available as SEO techniques will enable you to see competitive levels for the most sought after or popular keywords for a selected subject. This will also enable optimization of your campaign for selecting effective keywords.
Link Building
Website owners aim to score high on the Google page ranks even when the algorithm that determines the page rank is changing constantly. The quality and the number of the links to your website will always be considered. It is advisable to use niche directories and sites that carry a good reputation as link backs to your website. When such links carry relevant and genuine content back to your website, it will certainly boost up your page rank. Numerous tools that help search engine optimization will enable you to see the number of links that the websites of your competitors contain. It will allow you to ensure that you create more links that are valid in order to get your page rank increased.
Inbound Linking
Besides creating numerous quality and relevant links that come back to your website, it is also important that such links are directed to separate pages across your website. This will enable you to target relevant links to specific pages on your website. It will not only help to enhance the user experience but it will also allow search engines to observe that your website contains valid content. It is a sure shot way of gaining a high page rank. Websites that have links going back only to their home page can be considered as shallow by all the search engines and it will give a feel that the links may not be genuine and that they are created by automation. It will reduce the value attached to your website.
Sitemaps
These are important tools to increase the navigation across the website. It will allow the users and the search engine web crawlers to search every web page of yours efficiently and swiftly. Every web page and its content will be easy to find and it will considerably bring down the number of clicks required for web browsers before they can reach their desired or required web content. There is a version of sitemaps that is being used by the search engines. They are XML sitemaps and they contain a list of pages that includes the dates on which the pages were modified last. These sitemaps are given to the search engines to help them locate and link to the content on your website.
Content Is King
An important part of search engine optimization efforts is to have relevant content that targets your keywords. The content has to be useful to readers and it has to be read easily with the proper density of keywords. The information has to be explained clearly so that it makes full sense to the readers. Content has to be relevant for search engines to link it to search terms. Stuffed keywords could drive the potential users away.
Optimization of Page Speed
Make sure your website is running in tip top shape, and fast. Page-speed is a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm and you should be making sure your site is loading fast enough. A couple great ways to speed up your site is caching, minifying, and eliminating render-blocking content. If your using WordPress, one of my favorite plugins for this is W3 Total cache. Play around with the settings in the plugin and run tests on your website using Google Page Speed Insights until you’ve reached a new record Page-Speed score.
Alt Tags for Your Images
Remember that search engines can’t see images, so make your your using relevant alt tags for all of your images.
Use of Social Media
Your website will get noticed faster if you use the social media channels. These channels could be various platforms that are web based along with technologies and applications that will allow people to interact socially with each other online. They include Facebook, YouTube, Digg and Twitter.
Mobile-Friendliness
Is your website responsive? I’m sure you’ve all heard of mobilegeddon by now. Mobile-friendliness is a strong ranking factor for Google given that more than 50% of searches are conducted on smartphone’s today. Make sure your website responds to the size of the users screen with appropriate sized tap targets. You can also use Google Page-Speed Insights to check the mobile friendliness score of your website.
Strategic Headings
The title of your web page will be the most important thing that the search engines will look at when deciding about what your web site is all about. It will also be the first thing that the visitors will see when they visit your website. It is necessary that the heading include a couple of keywords that are relevant to the content on your pages to offer appropriate targeting of audiences.
