How to improve your SEO
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation”, this is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural results in search engines. It aims to improve your website’s position on search results pages. The higher a website is listed, the more people will see it.
If you’re relying on people to find you through a google search, SEO needs to be at the top of your priority list. You won’t be able to generate business leads if nobody can find you. The top result on Google has a 33% chance of being clicked, this means if you’re not number one on the page, you’ve just missed out on a third of traffic. Most of the time, when other websites rank higher than your website, it’s because they are making a conscious effort to improve their SEO.
Here are 10 tips for you to improve your SEO.
1. Improve Your Page Loading Speed
One way to improve your SEO is by improving your page loading speed. If your page loading screen is running slow, this can be harmful to a multitude of reasons. The first and most critical reason being Google will recognize it and it will seriously harm your ranking. A slow website will also drastically impact the way visitors connect and engage with your site pages, as a result, those negative reactions will also harm your ranking. Above is a graph to show how abandonment rates increase for pages with slow loading times.
Research shows 40% of visitors will abandon websites if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, what’s even more shocking is that 80% of those visitors won’t ever return to that website. This is very bad news for your SEO ranking because ultimately, it kills traffic to your site.
On the flip side, if your pages load fast, people will keep coming back. This makes it extremely important to optimize both your page speed and server response time. If you want to test the speed of your website, there are online services such as Pingdom available to use for free. This will allow you to test your website from different locations all over the world. If you find that your site is running slow the best bet is to check your themes and plug-ins and consider changing your web hosting provider.
2. Produce High-Quality Content
If you barely touch your website or review it, the chances are you probably don’t have the greatest SEO right now. To drive more traffic to your website and increase its popularity, you need to give your visitors a reason to come back to your website. You must make sure the content you’re delivering to visitors is high quality, recent, and relevant.
Dwell time is another factor that can make or break your SEO, this relates to how much time people spend on your website per visit. If your site has fresh, inviting, new information it will keep visitors on your page for longer, thus improving your dwell time. Websites that provide highly informative content typically have long dwell times.
3. Optimise Your Images
Pictures and other images are a great tool for your website, but they’re not of much use unless they are optimized properly to improve your SEO ranking. Huge images can slow down your page loading time, which, as mentioned before, harms your ranking.
Resize and compress your images to optimize them, you can also strategically use your images to sneak in keywords by naming them accordingly. You can also use keywords in the title of your images as well as in the descriptions and captions.
4. Break Up Your Content With Header Tags
Headings are another way to help improve your SEO and the overall user experience on your website. This is because they break up the content and make it easier to read or skim. Headers also make things look more eye-catching and appealing, which is always going to be beneficial.
if your website is just a big intimidating block of text, it’s going to discourage your visitors from spending a lot of time on it. As a result, your SEO will consequently suffer. If You’re running your site on WordPress, you can easily change the header tags.
5. Start Blogging
Blogging is great for your business and it’s an outstanding tool for lead generation and helps you to engage with your visitors on your website. What most people don’t realize is blogging also helps to improve your SEO ranking. The reason being producing fresh, updated, relevant content can drive people to your website and give them a reason to stay and browse on your pages for a while. Blogs are the perfect channel for you to accomplish this.
If you can establish a large group of faithful readers, you can get lots of traffic to your website on a daily basis. As well as this, you can incorporate other things I have discussed so far into your posts as well such as images and header tags. other elements like links increased readability, and keywords can also be incorporated into these posts. All of this improves your SEO ranking.
Check out our article on how to start your own blog with WordPress.
6. Add More Than Just Text
Another way to improve your SEO is by diversifying the content on your page. The content you produce on your website shouldn’t just be written. As I said before, pictures are great too, but there’s more you can do to improve your ranking. Consider other multimedia elements such as videos, slideshows, or audio to your website all of these things can greatly improve the overall user experience.
Consumers love videos, and many would much rather learn about something by watching it over reading just text. It’s much easier on the eyes to watch something instead of reading something. Depending on the length of your videos, people could be on your page for several minutes, if this happens, this will definitely improve your SEO ranking.
7. Use Infographics
Infographics pack a huge SEO punch. For your Infographics to be powerful you need two things, great design, and great content. You should never overlook the content when creating Infographics lots of people tend to do this and they never perform well.
I recommend coupling your infographic with at least 2,000 words of high-quality content. That is because Google won’t index the text on the Infographic itself, so writing long-form content will give you extra power. Another cool tip is to make them move. Infographics will help improve your SEO by keeping users engaged within the website. This also has the added benefit of improving your bounce-rate. Bounce-rate has a huge effect on SEO and keeping a user engaged on a website for a longer period of time can improve your SEO dramatically.
8. Turn A Standard Post Into A Long-Form Post
A pretty obvious fact is that long-form content always performs better than, say, a typical 500-word post. A nice trick you can do with thin content is to spend 30 minutes “beefing up” one of your shorter posts (1,000 words or less) by adding more content, graphs, charts, and visuals until it’s bona fide long-form content.
9. Make Sure Your Sites Are Readable
You should always keep your audience in mind when you’re writing content for your website. If you’re wanting to drive people to your website and get them to stay there, speak in terms that they can understand.
your content should be written in a way that the majority of people will be able to understand. If you’re struggling to decipher whether or not your content is readable, you can use online resources for help. One good resource is Readable.com tools like these can help you identify words that may be too long or too difficult for people to comprehend.
10. Optimise Your Links
There are certain things you can do to optimize the credibility of your website. It’s all good talking the talk but if you can’t back it up you’re not going to come across as believable and trustworthy to your page visitors. All of your data claims should be linked to trustworthy and authoritative sources. You should make sure to use outbound hyperlinks to those websites. This is a good way to improve your SEO as linking to authoritative sources signals to Google and other search engines that you know what you are talking about. There are several different attributes for links, to improve your SEO try to use a few dofollow links in your content.