Like most people, you want to rank as high as possible in search engines. After all, higher search engine placement means more traffic and more exposure to your business or website. But where do you begin how to improve SEO ranking?
This blog post gives tips on how to improve SEO ranking. By following these tips, you’ll be well on your way to higher rankings and increased traffic in no time!
What is SEO?
Search engines search for elements such as title tags, keywords and image tags, internal link structures, inbound links (also called backlinks), and other elements in a website. To determine how high your site should rank in search engines’ SERPs, search engines also consider site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external factors.
SEO is a combination of all these factors. It drives visibility and rankings.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a process that increases a company’s visibility through organic search results. These efforts result in more visitors to the company’s site, increasing their chances of conversions and leading to more customers and revenue.
SEO is simply a strategy to ensure that people searching for your product or service category on Google find your website.
There are many ways to improve your site’s SEO. We’ll discuss some tips on how to improve SEO ranking. Keep reading!
How Does SEO Work?
SEO involves optimizing a website’s contents, conducting keyword research, and gaining inbound links to increase its ranking and visibility. Although you can see the results on the SERP as soon as a search engine has crawled the webpage, it can take several months for the SEO efforts to materialize fully.
Rankings
This is how search engines determine where to place a web page in the SERP. Rankings are determined starting at position zero and continuing through the last search engine results. A web page can only rank for one position at any given time. The ranking of a web page can change over time due to competition, age, and algorithm changes made by the search engine.
Visibility
This term refers to how prominent a domain is in search engine results. A domain that isn’t visible on search engines for many search queries is considered lower search visibility. However, a domain with higher search visibility is more prominent.
Both are responsible for delivering the main SEO goals – traffic and domain authority.
How to Improve SEO Ranking: Tips for Success
Here are tips on how to improve your search engine rankings:
1. Create Relevant Content
Content is king, so ensure you have a steady stream of quality content published on your site if you want to improve your search engine rankings!
By writing content that appeals to your audience, you increase your website’s traffic, improving your site’s authority and ranking.
Use web writing techniques like using short sentences, active voice, and bulleted lists to present yourself as an expert on your topic.
Keywords
For each page, identify and target relevant and specific search terms. Think about how your reader might search for that specific page.
Multiple Keyword Phrases
It is difficult for a single webpage to rank for more than one phrase—unless you use very similar keywords.
If you want to rank for two different keywords, you’ll need to make two separate web pages.
Keyword Placement
Once you’ve decided on your keywords, you should consider how to incorporate them into your URLs, titles, and heading tags. Remember, it is important to remain natural and user-friendly.
If you’re looking to optimize your website’s SEO, be smart about the keyword terms you choose. You don’t want “Engineering” in your URLs or “The Northern Lights” to appear on every page. While it’s vital to optimize for search, don’t neglect the user experience.
Content
The most influential factor in SEO is quality content.
Include your keywords in your opening paragraph, closing, and at least two other times throughout the rest of your text.
As a credible source of information, it’s necessary to provide links to relevant resources on your website and other websites. By doing this, you will provide valuable information for your audience and improve your reputation.
Use bold and italic text to emphasize your keywords, but don’t go overboard. Your language should still read like regular, natural writing.
Don’t write for the search engines. Write for the user.
2. Make Sure Your Web Content is Up-to-Date
We firmly believe that content is king. And search engines agree.
Keeping your website content updated is a great way to show your visitors that you care about keeping them informed. You should regularly review and update the content on your site on a, for example, a semester basis.
Blogging
Blogging is a great way to boost your SEO. Try adding fresh content to your company’s website, focusing on keywords your target audience will search for.
If you want to improve your blog’s SEO, link your related posts together. This will give your readers more information on the topic, which is what Google is looking for.
3. Optimize Your Metadata
When building a website, each page has a space between its HTML tags containing information about the page. This data, called “metadata,” is populated by content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress, created by the UMC.
It’s important to update your metadata as your business evolves continually. This will ensure your site’s visitors have the best experience possible.
Page Title Metadata
The title tag is the most important piece of on-page SEO.
Your marketing team should put together an automation system that automatically creates the meta description for each web page based on the content of your page. This allows you to create better, more descriptive titles for your pages.
Description Metadata
The meta description is the short text that shows up in search results. Think of it as a storefront window. It’s what entices people to come in.
A meta description should be around 150 characters and accurately describe the page’s content. While they may not always show, giving them the option is important.
Keyword Metadata
Although keywords are not used for ranking purposes, it’s still a good idea to add them to your metadata since they reflect what your site is about. This makes it easier for people to find the site when they’re searching using relevant search keywords.
Aim to include 3-7 different phrasings, each having 1-4 words.
For example, “Computer Science Degree” would be a good keyword.
4. Create a Link-Worthy Website
A site with helpful information is more likely to encourage other websites to link to it, improving your search engine optimization. It’s also more likely to improve brand loyalty among your customers, encouraging them to refer others to your site.
You can boost your credibility and authority by including links to authoritative sources. Instead of “Click here,” write out the destination.
To ensure that your pages are as accessible as they can be, use clear, concise links. Not only will doing this make your web pages more search engine friendly, but it will also make it easier for those with visual disabilities or who are using screen readers.
5. Add Alt Tags
Always use image and video content with descriptive, keyword-rich ALT attributes. This makes it easier for search engine crawlers to find your content, which is important for those who browse the web with text-based web browsers or screen-readers.
6. Use Social Signals
Social signals are the number of social media shares, likes, or overall attention that a piece of content receives online. Search engines use many factors to determine the quality of a website, page, or webpage. These include social signals.
Although it is not clear how social signals impact rankings, it is evident that sharing content on social media has a higher potential to convert into traffic. Your content will receive more attention, which means it will likely be shared and linked.
Search engines use social signals to index and crawl the content. This is why sharing new content on social media can be one of the fastest ways to get it indexed quickly by search engines
7. Increase Your Page Speed
Three leading platforms are required for a website to be successful. These platforms include desktop, tablet, and mobile platforms. The desktop platform is the most common platform to test page speed optimization. Many websites don’t optimize their page speed for mobile or tablet platforms.
Your mobile and tablet templates may load slowly because they are not optimized. Google considers all three when ranking web pages in search results. This means that your page could load faster on the desktop platform but not rank well on the mobile platform.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights can be a good place for cross-platform testing. It measures load time from both a desktop and mobile perspective.
8. Track Performance With Google Analytics
I have only discussed SEO strategies you can use to improve your website’s ranking. How do you know if your SEO strategies are bringing you positive results? This is why you need tracking tools. Google Analytics is the best tool to monitor your SEO performance.
Google Analytics provides metrics to help you better understand your audience and curate content to meet their needs. Below are some useful metrics that I have found to be very helpful in my website analysis.
Device Information
You may be familiar with the Overview section of Google Analytics. It shows you data split between tablet, desktop, and mobile users. You can dig deeper into each segment to find out which brand of device is being used by the visitors, their service providers, and even screen resolutions.
Referral Traffic
Google Analytics gives you data about where your website visitors are coming from. You can check whether your traffic comes from organic, paid, or direct sources.
Behavior Flow
This tool allows you to find out which pages users visit on your site, how often they visit each page, how long they stay on each page, and how fast they leave. This information will help you better understand your audience and optimize your content.
Real-Time Data
Google Analytics data shows you real-time user interactions with your site. This information is beneficial when launching a new website design or landing page.
9. Make It Easy for People to Access Your Site
Website accessibility means all users should have access to the website, regardless of disability or impairment.
Accessibility can also limit the usability for people with visual, cognitive, or physical disabilities.
For a few years, accessibility has been a critical topic in SEO discussions. Core Web Vitals will inform you if your site is inaccessible. This is important to consider if your site has a poor user experience.
Here are some design and development tips to improve website accessibility. This will ensure that all users with disabilities can access your website’s accessibility features.
- Use proper heading tags in your content to assist visually impaired users when they reach key points.
- Pay attention to what colors you choose for your text. High contrast colors will help people distinguish text from the background. You should also focus on visual elements such as larger CTA buttons, animations on hover, underlining important texts, and so on.
- A font size that is easily readable on all devices and screen sizes should be used. For ease of reading, ensure you have enough white space on the web page. Facilitating tools are also available that allow users to magnify the text for those who find it difficult to read.
- Some users may wish to access your website via keyboard shortcuts. It can cause severe problems for some users if your site isn’t keyboard-accessible.
- Forms on your website should be clean and have a provision for assistance during filling out. Avoid using CAPTCHA and include descriptive labels for each field. Use bold warning signals to indicate when the form is not working.
- Use images with descriptive Alt text, transcripts, or captions to make videos and podcasts more accessible. Your site can also be used to assist visually impaired users by providing orientation cues.
10. Monitor the Google Search Console regularly
A successful SEO strategy should also include regular monitoring of the Google Search Console. You can find a lot of information here to help you understand why your site isn’t ranking well.
Many issues can be found with indexing, mobile usability, and security.
The Performance tab will also give you an overview of your site’s ranks.
This page will show you which keywords are ranking well, which are getting the most clicks, and which are getting the most impressions.
11. Optimize Images
Images are essential for websites to make their content more appealing and engaging to users. Images are essential for SEO. Images provide search engines with crucial contextual information. Optimized images can speed up your website and increase page loading time, which will improve user engagement and rank.
Understanding the basics of image optimization is essential to help your business rank higher in SERPs. BuzzSumo found that articles with images once every 75-100 words received twice the number of shares than articles with fewer images.
For ranking purposes, the first rule is to use original and unique images as much as possible. You must credit any images or visuals you use from other websites. It is illegal to copy images from other websites and re-use them without permission.
Optimizing images for faster loading is important. You must ensure that the image quality does not suffer. It will affect the user experience. Images with larger resolutions and dimensions can slow your site’s speed. You will need to reduce the file size by using image compression tools to use these images.
Here’s the catch: if you compress images too much, they will lose their quality. You should choose a file size that maximizes quality.
When choosing images for your website, it is important to note the file type. Images come in one of the following formats: JPG (PNG), GIF (GIF), and SVG. PNG is for simple images. For images with many colors, it is recommended that you use JPG format.
WebP format is a file format that Google developers have created to replace previously mentioned image formats.
Choosing the correct image file name is crucial to improving search engine rankings. Every image uploaded to your site should have an appropriately named file name. Add target keywords to your Alt text and separate them using hyphens. Add the target keyword to the file name.
A caption beneath images is another important feature that many people overlook when optimizing them. Captions can be added to images in addition to Alt text. This will enhance the user experience.
Now, look at the technical elements that can help website images rank. First, add structured image data. Google Images supports structured data for product images and videos. When you add image structured information, the search engine will display your images in rich image results.
Next, create a sitemap. Sitemaps are files that contain all information about your website. Include all necessary information such as image metadata, licensing information, contact information, and other pertinent information. Include all images you add to your sitemap so search engine crawlers can find them.
12. Get Your Content on Google’s Featured Snippets
It is easy to see your competitors find out how they rank for featured snippet optimization. SEMrush is an excellent tool for analyzing where your competitors are in featured snippet optimization.
First, go to SEMrush. Next, enter a domain and click on “Organic Research.” Finally, click the “Featured Snippet” button in the bottom right. You can then see which keywords and topics your competitors rank for and optimize your content to match those keywords and topics, increasing your chances of ranking.
Have you heard of “snippet bait”? This is the following technique I will share with anyone who wants to rank for the featured short-term.
First, search for keywords that you rank for. It is almost impossible for any keyword your content ranks on page 2 of SERP to be featured in the featured snippet. This is crucial because more than 99% of feature snippets are generated from the first page SERP results.
Conclusion
If you want to improve your SEO ranking, you can do a few things. By following these tips on how to improve SEO ranking, you’ll be well on your way to higher rankings and increased traffic in no time!
