Are you looking for ways how to improve website SEO? If so, then you’re in the right place! In this blog post, we’ll share 11 tips on how to get started.
SEO can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. By following this guide on how to improve website SEO and staying consistent with your efforts, you can see improvements in your website’s ranking over time. So let’s get started!
How to Improve Website SEO
Search engine optimization is not just a fad. SEO isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Your website should focus on this now as well as in the future.
If you’re just starting to focus on SEO, it’s not too late. You may be a little bit behind, but that doesn’t mean you can’t catch up. Just focus on creating quality content and making sure your site is accessible and user-friendly.
11 Steps to Improve SEO Rankings
Here are my top 11 ways to boost your website’s search engine rankings.
1. Optimize Your Page Loading Speed
Your page load speed is important for a couple of reasons.
If your website’s load speed is too slow, it will negatively impact your ranking on Google.
But slow websites can also negatively impact how visitors interact with your pages, such as by making them less likely to convert.
Negative interactions with customers, such as complaints, can hurt your rankings.
How fast is too fast?
40% of website visitors will click away if a page doesn’t load within 3 seconds.
What’s more shocking is that 80% of those visitors won’t return to that website. This is terrible for your SEO ranking because it ultimately kills traffic to your site.
If your page doesn’t load quickly, people won’t come back.
Google’s algorithm will take into account your website’s popularity when determining your search ranking.
This emphasizes the importance of optimizing both page speed and server response times.
Want to check how fast your site loads? There are free services available such as pingdom.com.
This will allow you to test your website’s loading speed from different locations all over the world.
If you’ve noticed that your WordPress site is loading slowly, then you might want to check your WordPress theme and any installed WordPress plugins.
If you’re experiencing slow loading speeds on your website, it could be due to your server.
2. Create High-Quality Content
How often does your company update the content on your main website?
If you’ve neglected your landing page since you first created it, your search engine rankings are probably pretty poor.
To drive traffic to a website, you need to give people a reason to visit the site again and again.
Your content marketing should be high-quality, relevant, and recent.
Dwell time is the amount of time that visitors spend on your site.
If the content of your page is new, interesting, or relevant, it will keep your readers on the page for longer.
Websites that publish a lot of high-quality, long-form, in-depth articles tend to have a longer average visitor duration.
Google Chrome is the most popular browser in the world, controlling nearly 45% of the Internet browser market share.
When a user bookmarks your site from a Chrome browser, it can help your search engine rankings.
Content that is useful and relevant is more likely to get your visitors bookmarking your site.
Optimize Your Images to Improve Your SEO
Images are a great addition to a website.
If you want your images to improve your SEO ranking, you need to make sure they are optimized properly. This includes factors such as the file format and size.
Large image files can slow down your page load speed, which, as I’ve explained, can hurt your rankings.
Compress or resize your image before uploading it.
You can also name images with relevant keyword phrases to help search engines find your site.
Let’s say you’re selling bath and body products or cosmetics.
Instead of using generic names like “shampoo1” for images, use more descriptive names like “best shampoo for long hair.”
You can also use keywords strategically in the title of your image, as well as in the caption or description. This will help improve your SEO and make it easier for people to find your images.
Break Up Your Content With Header Tags
Another way to improve the UX of your website is by using headings.
They break your content up into smaller chunks, making it easier to read or scan.
Plus, using header tags can make your content look more appealing and organized, which is always beneficial.
If your site is just walls of text and paragraphs, people aren’t going to want to spend much time on it.
If you’re not careful, your SEO ranking will suffer.
If you’re using WordPress for your website, you can easily change the header tags to improve your SEO ranking.
Start Blogging
Blogs are great for business.
It’s a fantastic tool to help you generate leads and keep in touch with visitors.
But most people don’t realize that blogs are also great for improving your search engine ranking.
Here’s the reason.
Producing fresh and relevant website content is a great way to drive traffic to your website.
Blogs are a perfect way for you to accomplish this.
If you can build a large following of loyal fans, you can drive a lot of traffic to your website every day.
You can also include images, headers, links, and keywords in these posts to improve SEO rankings.
Add Multimedia Elements
Your website content shouldn’t only be text.
Pictures are great, but there’s a lot more you can do to boost your search engine rankings.
Add other multimedia content such as video, slides, or audio files to your website.
All of this can help to improve the experience for the user.
Why?
Videos are becoming more and more popular, and consumers are requesting more of them.
It’s much easier to see something than hear about it.
But, there is a direct link between the number of videos and other types of media you have on your site and your search engine rankings.
These new features can drastically improve the length of time that someone stays on your site.
The longer your video, the longer your viewers will be on the page.
If Google sees that your site is getting a lot of traffic, it will automatically rank it higher.
Use Infographics
KISSMetrics generated over 2 million visits and 41,142 links using infographic marketing.
Their infographics are still performing extremely well.
If you want your infographics to be truly effective, you need to focus on both content and design. Don’t make the mistake of neglecting the latter – it’s just as important as the former!
A lot of people do, and guess what happens? Their infographic doesn’t perform very well.
I recommend pairing your infographics with 2,000 words or more of quality content. This is because search engines can’t read text on images, so having longer-form copy gives you more SEO juice.
One final tip on making an infographic: Make it interactive!
Making data move changes its visualization.
Create Long-Form Content
Long-form content is proven to rank better in search engines than shorter posts.
Here’s a neat way you can do that with thinner articles.
Look for a post under 1,000 words that never lived up to its full potential. Take 30 minutes and add more content to it, such as more text, images, videos, charts, infographics, and more.
Your beefed-up post is now long-form content.
Make Sure Your Content is Readable
When you’re creating content for your website, keep in mind who your target audience is.
If you want to encourage people to spend time on your site, you need to speak to them in a way that they can comprehend.
Be careful not to sound like you’re trying to be a doctor or lawyer (even if you are one).
Your content should be written so that the average person can understand it.
Unsure if your content is easy to read?
Online resources can help you. One of my favorite tools for reading online is Readable.com.
Tools like this can help you identify words that might be difficult for people to comprehend. This can be useful to make your content more readable.
3. Optimize Your Links
There are a few things you can to do increase the credibility of your website.
Sure, you can make claims, but it looks much more credible if you back them up with evidence.
All of your claims should be backed up by reputable and reliable sources.
Make sure to only link out to authoritative websites. Also, make sure the information you’re linking to is up to date.
Outbound links to resources from 2012 are no longer relevant and won’t be as effective for your SEO ranking.
Internal links are an important part of any blog post.
These links will take your visitors to other pages on your website that might be of interest to them.
Fix Broken Links
If you’re using authority websites for your links, you shouldn’t have to worry about them breaking.
But it can happen.
A broken link can tank your search engine rankings.
In addition, it doesn’t look professional when links you include in your content lead to invalid websites.
Use tools, like Dead Link Checker, to search for broken links on your site.
If you sign up, you can also set up your account to get checked automatically. This way, you can be sure that your account is always secure.
If any of your links go bad, the app will let you know immediately so you can replace them.
You can also monitor other sites in your industry using this resource.
How can that improve your search engine optimization?
If you come across a dead link on another website, you can notify the webmaster of that page and ask them to replace the dead link with a link to your website. By doing this, you are not only helping the webmaster fix their site, but also improving your own SEO.
If you come across a broken link on someone’s website, don’t be afraid to reach out and let them know. They’ll appreciate that you took the time to help them fix the issue, and they may be willing to return the favor in the future.
If you want to improve your website’s traffic and SEO ranking, then you should focus on creating outbound links to other websites. This will help drive more traffic to your website and improve your chances of being found in search engines.
Diversify Your Links
There are a ton of different link types out there, such as blog roll links, homepage links, and directory links. However, many marketers tend to only focus on building one type of each.
You can’t just rely on one method of building links to your site if you want to get high rankings.
If you want to rank highly, it’s important to get links to your site from a variety of sources, such as blogs, directories, and even the homepages of other websites. Just make sure that the links you’re building are also relevant, as these tend to have the biggest impact.
Get Links From Related Niches
In some niches, such as marketing, recipes, and entertainment, it’s easy to get links. This is because there are hundreds of thousands of blogs that are willing to link to you if you make a good case.
But in some industries, those types of blog posts just don’t exist.
When all else fails, get creative.
One way to effectively get links to your site is by getting them from sites that are related to yours.
If you’re a plumber, related niches would be home DIY, home decor, and HVAC systems.
Think of any other niches that you may be able to add expertise.
Then, all the usual search engine optimization techniques come into play: guest blogging, participating in forums, and so on.
Let’s run through an example of how this works.
Let’s say you are an interior designer.
Home decor and real estate are two completely different niches.
Home decor could add a lot of value to your home.
What can you do with this?
If you want to get links from related niches, one option is to create content for your site and then reach out to a home blogger asking for a link. This is a standard SEO tactic that can be effective in getting quality links.
Or, you could write an article about this for a popular website.
By writing a guest post for a popular site in your niche, you can not only rank for long-tail keywords and get continuous traffic but also get immediate referral traffic from the site you post on.
4. Optimize Your Site For Mobile Devices
As you probably know, more and more people are using mobile devices.
It has grown so much in popularity that it’s now outpacing laptops and computers.
Over 60% of searches on Google come from mobile.
Google has recognized this and is ranking websites based on it.
Your site should be mobile-friendly.
There’s no getting around this.
If your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it will negatively impact the user experience and your ranking.
Create a Mobile App
Creating a mobile application can, in fact, help boost your search engine optimization.
While this option may be costly, it’s an investment in your business.
How can a mobile app boost your business’s search engine optimization? Google has now indexed mobile apps on Google Search with Firebase App Indexing.
When people are searching the web for terms related to your business, they may come across your mobile app, and that can create some valuable organic traffic.
For instance, when you search for “restaurant reservations” in Google, you’ll see the OpenTable app on the first page.
When your app is easily found on a Google search, it becomes an instant valuable resource for anyone looking for that specific type of information.
When you have a high-ranking app on Google, you reap the benefits of increased visibility and traffic. Yes, it may be costly to develop and maintain such an app, but the return on investment is well worth it.
5. Optimize Page Format
Don’t rush your web design.
It should be easy to read, well organized, and free of clutter.
Think about your font and size.
Avoid using too many colors, fonts, and sizes.
Bullet points and checklists are easy ways for readers to quickly scan through an article.
The cover photo must be of reasonable size and the formatting of the text easy to skim.
If a website has too much going on, it can look unprofessional and confusing.
Your website’s architecture, as well as your site’s overall layout, are factors that play into how visitors interact with it.
A clean and organized website layout will help improve your search engine rankings.
Contact Information Should Be Easy to Find
Have you ever had trouble finding the contact information for businesses online?
I have.
This should never, ever happen.
Your contact information should be clear, easy to find, and in plain view.
What would be the worst thing that could happen if you forgot to include your phone number, email address, and location on your website? People might start reporting your website.
This will ruin your search engine rankings.
6. Encourage Sharing on Social Media
Social media marketing is essential for every business and brand.
That information is pretty well known.
But did you know that you can improve your SEO ranking by getting people to share links to your website on social media?
If you encourage social sharing as part of your SEO campaigns, you’ll see some great results.
Including social media share buttons on all your blogs, videos, and infographics is a great way to increase engagement.
When information appears on people’s timelines, all it takes is one click for them to share it. This makes sharing easy and convenient, which encourages more people to do it.
7. Use Keywords Appropriately
Keywords are an important part of this equation.
Include keywords throughout your content that people will be searching for.
But do it in moderation.
If you use too many keywords on your website, Google will notice and it could negatively affect your ranking. Use keywords sparingly so they fit naturally into sentences.
Keyword phrases should flow smoothly into natural-sounding conversations.
Make sure to include your keywords in your headers and alt text for images.
You should also use long-tail keywords, which are three or four-word phrases that could be found in a search. These are usually more specific and have less competition than shorter, more general keywords.
People don’t just search “phones” on the internet. They may type “Best Flip Phone” or “Best Android Phone” when looking for something to buy.
If your keyword matches their search query, then your site has a higher chance of ranking higher in search results.
Write Click-Worthy Titles and Descriptions
When creating headlines for SEO, remember that you have only 65 character spaces to work with.
If your headlines are too long, the excess words will be cut off.
Here are some tricks for creating clickable headlines:
- Add keywords at the beginning of the title. Readers usually scan only the first two words of a headline.
- Your title line should entice the reader to click through to your content.
- Make it emotional.
Write a Great Meta Description
The meta tag description is the next thing you should focus on.
Google has made it easy to create good descriptions by giving you tips. The two most important things to remember are to make them descriptive and unique. You can do this by front-loading keywords that are relevant to the article, and making each description different from other pages.
Keep in mind that Google limits meta descriptions to 160 characters or fewer.
Meta descriptions are an important ranking factor for SEO. While they may not be as important as your heading, they’re still worth paying attention to. Make sure to write unique and engaging meta descriptions to help improve your website’s ranking.
8. Optimize your URLs
While your Title Tag should be emotionally compelling, your URL doesn’t need to.
Use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
While LSI is a very powerful technique, not many sites use it. And that’s too bad because LSI can give your site an SEO bump.
LSI is a process that search engines use to find related keywords. It helps them identify synonyms for the main keywords on your website. This, in turn, can help improve your SEO.
For example, if you’re writing an article about Facebook, be sure to include “social media network” as an LSI keyword.
Remove Unnecessary Code
If your site has excess code, it will take longer for search engines to crawl it. This is bad because on-page JavaScript and CSS can slow down the crawling process.
Your code should be lightweight and concise. This will help your page load time, which is important for SEO.
9. Get Your Name Out There
When I first started, building links to my site was a slow process. It would take me months or years to get results because I had no backlinks from authoritative websites.
But, after launching my podcasting website, it started to get picked up by major publications like TechCrunch. After a few weeks, it started to rank for highly competitive keywords in the Podcasting industry.
It was then that I realized that getting press coverage for my business was the way to go. From then on, I focused on getting more media coverage for all of my businesses, which helped me to rank them faster and higher than before.
If you want to get press for your company, one way is to pay a PR agency. Another way is to build relationships with reporters. You can help them out with their stories and give feedback to increase the chance that they will be interested in covering your company.
Or, if you’re feeling brave, you can try the cold approach too.
Join Question and Answer Sites
People love to learn, which is why so many post questions on websites like Yahoo! Answers and Quora.
The key to writing a great answer on answer sites is to be thorough and include links to your site when it’s relevant.
Just be careful not to sound too sales-y.
By answering a question, you are not only helping out the person who asked, but you are also showing your willingness to help.
By posting your link in a comment, you’re increasing its visibility. You’ll be seen as a valuable member of the community and people will more likely click on your links and visit your site.
Get Interviewed
I’ve found that interviews are the easiest way to generate links. Every time someone interviews you, there’s a good chance they’ll link to your website. This is especially useful because the links will be relevant, as the linking web page will typically talk about your story or what your company does.
The links you generate will be highly relevant, as the linking web page will typically talk about your story or what your company does. This is because interviews usually result in links.
Although it’s indeed easy for me to get interviews because I have an established brand and have been doing this for a while, it didn’t come without a lot of hard work.
During my first few years as an entrepreneur, I constantly emailed 2-4 different blogs per day that covered my industry and asked them if they would feature me.
Most of them either didn’t respond to my emails or flat out said “no”. However, I found that if I followed up with them and gave them some feedback about their other interviews, they were much more likely to agree to interview with me.
For instance, if a competitor of yours interviewed Mixergy, you could tell the interviewer what you thought of the interviewee. However, you would also point out the parts of the conversation where you disagreed with the interviewee.
End your email by asking if they would like you to appear on their show.
If you want to increase your chances of getting interviews, follow this tactic. You should be able to get one or two interviews a week by using it.
Become an Expert in Your Niche
This sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it?
It’s not as complicated as you might think.
You can increase your website traffic by improving your brand. I’ve spent about 10 years working on my personal branding.
I then leveraged my brand to generate traffic and generate leads, which helped me create multiple multimillion-dollar companies.
Here is how to do the same thing.
Share your knowledge tactfully and help others without giving out business secrets.
First, sign up for Q&A sites like Quora, Yahoo Answers, and WikiHow. Next, join some LinkedIn groups and reach out to other websites in your niche that could use your guest authorship or input. By answering questions and helping users on these platforms, you can increase traffic to your website without promoting your business directly or linking to your website.
Answer questions and help users with their problems. Do not link or mention anything about your company or website.
If your advice is helpful, people will start to request your help. When those requests for assistance start rolling in, it’s time to start striking (in a positive, helpful manner, that is).
Now that you’ve helped people, you can link to your site or article.
Your followers and browsers are following your links, and your web traffic is multiplying.
Be careful when linking back to your site from sites like Wikipedia, as they may penalize you for over-linking. Instead, write helpful, informative answers on other sites, and link to your own site when relevant.
Influencing the Influencers
You may have heard that influencer marketing is dead. Well, I can promise you that if any influential person links back to your content, a swarm of visitors will follow suit.
Now, you can’t just walk up to an influencer and beg them to share your content with their audience. Why?
Because your opening line is the first thing the influencers will read, you must make it count.
An influencer receives many requests for them to promote other people’s content and can usually tell if it’s a generic request or not.
Instead of spamming influencers with your content, try motivating them to share it for you.
I’ll show you how to do that with an example.
If you’re targeting “men’s fashion” as your keyword phrase, a good place to start is by Googling “top blogs on men’s fashion.” You’ll get plenty of results to work with.
I found the top blog, Off The Cuff, and it was founded by Christopher Hogan. He has a lot of great information on his site!
When I visited Christopher Hogan’s Twitter page, I noticed that he tweets often and some of his tweets are about formal fashion in different seasons.
The best way to influence the influencers is to study them and figure out what makes them tick. Once you know what motivates them, you can create content that appeals to their interests. For example, if you want to influence Christopher Hogan, you could create an infographic or write an article based on formal fashion for men for summer. If he likes your content, he may share it with his followers, which would give you targeted traffic that has the potential to convert.
This is just one example of what you can do with this method. There’s a lot more you can do with it.
Use your creative juices to come up with more informative content in your particular niche.
Boring Niche? Make it More Fun!
What can you do in a “boring” or “dull” industry?
Can you really have fun while unclogging pipes?
If you view the subject as boring, then you won’t be able to.
But often, there are ways to make your marketing material entertaining.
SEO expert, and founder of Backlinko, did a case study on this very topic. His client, a bug exterminator, wasn’t exactly the most exciting of topics.
However, he created a high-quality infographic on an interesting topic: how bugs can help you defeat garden pests. That infographic got picked up by a few prominent blogs, which helped increase his visibility and reach.
Another closely related topic to pest control is gardening.
But, what’s even cooler is that he created “funny” content that people actually enjoyed.
Bugs aren’t exactly enjoyable, but he made the process more enjoyable by highlighting the benefits they provide.
And you can do this in any industry by focusing your copy on the most exciting benefits instead of the most mundane details.
For example, are you in the business of sealing driveways?
That certainly sounds boring but what if you created content like:
- How much sealer would you need to seal Leonardo DiCaprio’s entire driveway?
- Choosing the wrong driveway sealant will cost you money: What is the true cost of paving a driveway?
I’m not so sure that all of those are real things, but the point is to turn the boring parts into an important element of a story. Just don’t make it the main focus and your readers will be much more engaged.
10. Get Set Up on Google Business
If you’re a local business, local search engine optimization (SEO) is a must.
If you haven’t been giving Google Business your attention, now is the time to set up an account. This will only take a few minutes and it’s worth it for your SEO.
This allows you to manage your business information, verify contact details, add images, monitor reviews, and more.
Get Into Google News
Google pulls news articles from two places—the regular search results page and the “News” tab.
Google News is a fantastic traffic source that you may not have considered before. It’s a great way to get your content seen by a wide audience.
Getting into Google News is no easy task. It requires hard work, constant updates, and well-written, interesting stories.
11. Use Tools to Outperform Content Marketing
Although content marketing is the number one way to get links to your site, it does not mean it is the best form of link building.
Releasing free tools in the marketplace outperforms content marketing by generating more backlinks and traffic.
If you want to generate a lot of traffic and links with your free tools, it’s important to create something that is both easy to use and in high demand. By figuring out what people are looking for, you can create a tool that meets their needs and provides value.
One of the best ways to figure out what you should release is to see what other companies are doing really well in your market.
Conclusion
Don’t get overwhelmed. Start by trying a few, and move on to the others.
You can check your traffic stats and your search rankings to validate your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
You’re on your way to better search engine results on Google in no time!
You could potentially even claim that number one spot.
By following these 11 tips on how to improve website SEO, you can see better results in your ranking over time. Just remember to be consistent with your efforts, and don’t give up! If you keep at it, you’ll see improvements.
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