If you intend to enjoy success online, you need to employ powerful SEO strategies. The focus of SEO is to put your website in front of more people in the search engine result pages (SERPs). The closer you are to the first ten results of any search term, the higher the traffic you can attract.
SEO advice can be found everywhere online, but how do you distinguish between tips that are just gimmicks and those that will deliver tangible and verifiable results?
Table of Contents
Actionable SEO Tips and Tricks to Boost Rankings
1. Figure Out Your Target Keywords
Having a good understanding of your target keywords is the perfect foundation of your SEO campaigns. These keywords are terms related to your business. They may include mentions of your product and services and your brand terms. If you are still unsure about the keywords to target with your SEO campaigns, you can use Google’s Keyword Planner or Keyword Tool.
2. Create a Blog
77% of Internet users read website blogs regularly. If you own a business website, you must think how to start a blog that allows you to connect better with your target audience. That is not possible with other channels like social media. By providing relevant, fresh and updated content on a blog, you can give your target audience all the information they need about your brand and comprehensively solve any problems they have.
High-quality blog posts also get noticed by the search engines, especially when they are shared or linked to by other people. This can help you reach even more people.
If you run a question-based search on Google right now, there is a high chance that the first thing you’ll see, is a featured answer in a box that comes before the other search results. You can try it with “web design topics” right now. That box and the content in it is a featured snippet.
A study showed that landing a single featured snippet position can increase the average click-through rate to a website by more than 100%. How can you claim a featured snippets position?
The target search keyword or question should feature within your headings in a blog post
The answer to the search should come directly under the heading, but should not be longer than 58 words. The answers should include words like “you can start by”, “the first step is”, “the answer is” etc.
You can use tools like SEMrush to find keywords you rank for that have featured snippets. If you are already in the top five positions on page one of the search result for the term, shake up your content with the tips above, and your content will become one of the featured snippets with time.
The headings in your posts are not just there to break up the content. They can improve your rankings if adequately optimized. How can you optimize your titles?
Tag all headings with the right title tags. <H1> for main titles, <H2> for subtitles, etc.
Include your primary keyword in at least one title (usually the H1).
The main titles of your post should have 65 characters or less, and six words in total.
5. Post In-Depth Content
Longer posts rank higher on Google, and for logical reasons. Quality in-depth pieces generally contain all the information on a subject matter or come pretty close. It is not a surprise, therefore, that the top-ranking pages on Google for many search terms have an average of 1,890 words. Google loves it when users can get all the answers they need from a single page. So, spend time to create more in-depth content for every page you publish or blog post you write.
Google understands a website by using bots to analyze a homepage and then gradually move to other links connected to it. So, the homepage shares its link juice with the other pages on the website and allows Google to discover new pages faster.
This is why you should interlink posts on your website. Adding a link to an old post in a new one not helps readers to discover more content on your site but also makes it easy for Google to crawl your new content quickly.
7. Incorporate Outbound Links
When writing a post, include links to other websites that can improve the reading experience and validate some of the points you have made. Google likes it when you are linking to high-value resources as it shows you are looking to help the reader even further. However, it is important to ensure that you are linking out to sites that are relevant to your post. Google penalizes websites that engage in commercial or inorganic link-building.
A meta description is a summary of the content on a page. You can see it under the link to a page in Google search results. Although meta descriptions are not analyzed when calculating the rank of a website, they affect a website’s click-through rates (CTR). Interestingly, CTR is a ranking factor. You can write your meta descriptions before publishing a post. If your website is WordPress based, Yoast SEO does an excellent job of helping you write meta descriptions. If you don’t write a description for your post, Google will use the first 150-160 characters in your article as the summary. For better results with your meta description, you should:
Add your target keywords to show the user that the post indeed contains what they are searching for
Talk to the user directly with an active voice.
Include call-to-actions like “find out now”, “click for the best tips” etc. This will trigger curiosity in the user.
9. Optimize Your Images
Your SEO campaign shouldn’t ignore images. Ensure that all your images are correctly optimized to reflect the content of the page. This increases the chances of the image ranking in search and bringing more traffic to the post. Google images account for 10% of all Google traffic. That represents a considerable number of users you cannot afford to ignore. To optimize all images properly, you should:
Name the images to show the content of the post
Use alt text to highlight what the image is about and increase the chances of the search engines finding it
Ensure the images are in the right format and optimally compressed to avoid a negative impact on your site speed.
Long-tail keywords are search terms that are conversational but include keywords. For example, “how can I make money online in the UK” is a long-tail form of the “make money online” keyword.
The main advantage of using long-tail keywords in SEO is that they are not as competitive as the shorter ones. By focusing on them, you can increase the chances of your posts ranking higher on Google. Additionally, targeting long-tail keywords allows you to create content that is optimized for voice search. SEMrush is a tool that can help you find these keywords.
11. Find Brand Mentions and Claim Your Links
It is a well-known fact that backlinks are an important ranking factor. So what do you do, when other people mention your brand without linking out to your website? Reach out and claim the links! Link-building is a resource-intensive process.
If you have dozens of websites that have mentioned your brand without giving you a link, some of your work is done. Reach out to the brand, and politely ask for the brand mention to be linked. It is a simple yet effective tactic for brands that are semi-popular already on the web.
12. Optimize for Mobile
Google loves websites that are optimized for mobile because half the users on the web at any given time are on mobile. If your website is not mobile-optimized, you are alienating half the web population and perpetuating a poor experience for Google users. The search engine giant already runs a mobile-first strategy. Go over the design of your website and ensure that your website is super-fast and responsive on mobile.
13. Change Your URL Structure
If your blog URL is such that the date of the post is highlighted, you need to ensure that the URL structure reflects any future updates. This is the only way your updates can get picked up by Google while the overall content remains relevant.
Some people elect to hide the date of posts to keep them evergreen. This may be counterproductive as both the web users and Google love to know if a post is current and relevant today. If there are similar posts to yours with a recent date highlighted, they will most likely rank higher.
14. Create Amazing Visual Content
72% of people will rather watch an explainer video instead of reading walls of text when looking for information about your brand or service. What does this tell you? Pay more attention to content can be consumed visually. Apart from videos, you can also create more infographics.
You don’t need to find radical content ideas either. By converting some of your best content to videos and infographics that can be published on YouTube and other social platforms, you can draw more traffic.
15. Build Your Social Signals and Online Brand
Social signals affect search engine rankings in the near and long-term. Incorporate social media into your SEO strategies. Generating as much buzz as possible around your brand can get you more organic backlinks, improve your over CTR and reduce your bounce rates.
SEO can yield high-quality results when done correctly. The tips and tricks we have covered here can help you get started on the right footing immediately. Avoid rogue SEO tricks like buying links, using SEO directories, content spamming and keyword stuffing. They will destroy your legitimacy on the web for both Google and your target audience.
Rithesh Raghavan, Co-Founder, and Director at Acodez IT Solutions, who has a rich experience of 16+ years in IT & Digital Marketing. Between his busy schedule, whenever he finds the time he writes up his thoughts on the latest trends and developments in the world of IT and software development. All thanks to his master brain behind the gleaming success of Acodez.
its very aggressive information for some one who look forward for Digital Marketing. As all we know about the present situation without organic search ranking result we could not grow up to higher levels. so thanks for the useful informations.
its very aggressive information for some one who look forward for Digital Marketing. As all we know about the present situation without organic search ranking result we could not grow up to higher levels. so thanks for the useful informations.
Thanks for sharing the information….
I think site security (SSL) is also a big ranking factor, because you must have SSL certificate for your site.