SEO Tips for Better Ranking
When you invest so much time, effort, and creativity into your website, you begin to protect it like your baby. And just like your baby, you need to nurture your website and give it the tools to continue to grow. It’s not always easy to know what comes next, though.
You can create thousands of content pages, but it will be fruitless if you don’t get traffic to your site. Even further, you will begin to doubt your abilities and the future of your business if you throw good money after bad.
However, there are answers to your questions and a roadmap to success by implementing some Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies that actually convert.
We are here to help you focus on some SEO tips to get you started on your way to a better ranking. But, first, let’s de-mystify SEO and learn a little about increasing website traffic.
What Exactly Is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
We’ve all heard the terms, but the truth is, most business owners only have a cursory understanding of how SEO works.
SEO is a set of strategies to help you improve traffic to your website. This improvement to traffic is in the form of quality and quantity. Browsers build your ranking based on natural and organic traffic. But how do you get natural and organic traffic? Through implementing SEO strategies, of course.
SEO strategies make your website design and content more attractive to web browsers allowing your site to be more positively ranked. Web browsers need to understand who you are and what you can offer, accept your site as the most credible option, and deliverable content.
SEO Tips For Better Ranking
Implementing SEO strategies can be challenging at first. However, like just about anything, the strategy becomes a habit and second nature as you practice.
One strategy to mention before we discuss SEO-specific strategies – What are your competitors doing to increase traffic? If they are achieving success, don’t copy them but analyse what they are doing. Will any elements of their strategy work for your business? It’s always important to stay on top of industry trends and to understand what is working (and what isn’t) for your competition.
Review your analytics as a starting point. Success is measurable via the changes to analytics before implementing SEO strategies and after. Focus on demographics, unique visitors, how long they remain on your site, location of visitors, and their associated behaviour. How does that change after implementation, and in an ongoing fashion?
Tip #1: Relevant And Consistent Content
Content should be relevant to your visitors. If you are a plumbing business, your visitors are probably not very interested in content about vitamins. Keep your content niche-specific and frequently updated. Frequency doesn’t mean you must post something every day. But if your visitors are used to seeing new content once a week, keep providing it to them once a week to give them a reason to return and to give search engines more relevant content to recommend to your audience.
Mix up your content with media. Include visuals such as photos, infographics, videos, reels, charts, and more. The goal is to make the content accessible to every person who wants to be on your site.
Side note: Accessibility is a huge factor in getting eyes on your content. Making sure that those with disabilities can access your content just as easily as those who are able-bodied shows that your content is for everyone, and it keeps you from cutting off a large portion of the population who also needs your services. In addition, Google ranks sites higher if they follow modern accessibility standards.
Tip #2: SEO Features Within Content
Writing an article is not the only component of your content. In addition, there are SEO features within your content that need focus. Each of these is vital to your website’s ranking. The more you can provide for browsers to identify your site as credible, the better you will perform.
Keywords
When someone performs a search on a web browser, they type in keywords or phrases. Based on your content and your industry niche, do some keyword research and try to anticipate what they will be searching for, and include these keywords organically and naturally within your content. Although it is vital to include several keywords, overstuffing your content with keywords can work against you. Choose a handful of keywords that you want to rank for in searches and focus on those.
Images
High-quality images make your website stand out. Stock photos are lovely, but they aren’t unique enough for Google to identify your site as special. Professional photos and graphics can make all the difference. When loading images and graphics, be sure to include alt tags which are another way for Google to find your content.
Your website theme has desirable image sizes for optimal processing. This means using images that are reasonably high resolution, but not so large that they bog down your page load times. Use images that are an appropriate resolution for the area that they are intended to fill.
In addition, choose .JPEG format over .PNG or other file formats that tend to be less compressed (and thus take up more bandwidth to load). This consistency allows your site to remain visually connected throughout all content.
Headers and Titles
When your content is written strictly as paragraphs, you are losing opportunities for web browsers to find you. Be sure to use the header tags, a title, and a URL that is not overly lengthy. Using keywords in these headers also makes parsing your content easier for Google, and makes recommending your pages all the more likely.
Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions
Meta tags and meta descriptions are additional ways to summarise what your content has to offer. These snippets allow Google to find your content and determine relevance to a person’s web browser search. The meta description is a short paragraph or long sentence that appears beneath the URL when someone performs a search. Use that space wisely to tell the potential visitors why they should choose you.
Tip #3: Link Building
Through the sharing of links with other websites, you are link building. Allow others to guest post on your site and offer to guest post on theirs. Interviews can work similarly. These tips can earn you visitors that may not have otherwise even heard of you. Additional markets bring unique visitors and improve your ranking.
Tip #4: Internal Links
Be sure to include some internal links in your content. Internal links are those that refer a visitor from that content to additional content within your site. For example, as a real estate firm, if a visitor is interested in buying their first home, naturally include links from your site to your blog or video that discusses home loans or moving companies. The goal is to keep visitors on your site as long as possible and to build trust with them by showing that you are an authority on the subject.
Tip #5: Site Security
Be sure your site has a Socket Security Layer (SSL) certificate that identifies your site as secure. So visitors know they can trust their data to be protected. For example, HTTPS:// identifies your site as secure versus HTTP://, not a secure site.
Not only does the SSL verify to visitors that they can trust your site and it is secure, but also Google does not rank HTTP sites as well. This ranking strategy is because they want websites to have an SSL certificate.
Are You Ready To Implement These SEO Tips For Better Ranking?
Agency Atlantic is a boutique web agency that prides itself on digital marketing and WordPress web development that looks good and is technically awesome!
Whilst you can use your marketing budget on paid advertisements and spend all day every day on social media, that can be an expensive, time-consuming route that does not necessarily bring the kind of web traffic you desire.
There are countless marketing tactics and strategies out there all claiming to give you overnight success but it’s all BS. These “gurus” are trying to sell you into the dream that digital space is easy. It’s not! It takes a lot of hard work.
Work with us and turn your ideas into a more elevated and profitable business with the power of SEO, SEM and SMM. Contact us today to learn how we can get you the traffic you need to help your business grow and thrive.
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