What do you think of when you hear “SEO”? What does it mean to you and where does your energy go when you try to improve your SEO and, consequently, the ranking of your website? The unfortunate thing is that most people think of nothing more than keywords when they think of SEO and that is where all of their focus goes.
If you keep your focus on keywords, you may realize that you’re putting all of your focus on keywords but aren’t making any real progress. What you need to do is take some time to think seriously about some of the other factors that affect your SEO.
The algorithms at Google and other major search engines don’t just look at how relevant your keywords are; they also consider such things as your broken links, the amount of time viewers stay on your site, your inbound and outbound links, the number of pages viewed on your website, and so on.
The simple act of attracting users to your website and then convincing them to stay there can make your website rank better on search engine results pages. You can also improve that ranking by improving the usability of your site and the experience of users on it.
To focus only on keywords is to be too narrow. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. When you optimize your site for the search engine, you seek to optimize all of it. That said, here are 8 secrets that will help you increase the ranking of your website in an all-rounded fashion.
1. Keep your Content Relevant, Useful, and High Quality
What you want to do here is increase the amount of time visitors spend on your website. The best way to do that is to provide users with content that they will enjoy and also find useful. They will want to stick around longer so that they can consume all the information they find on your website.
According to studies, the best performing content is content between 2000 and 2500 words in terms of increasing the dwell time of users.
Now, to be entirely fair, the word count isn’t as important to your SEO as the usefulness of the information you are providing. It doesn’t matter how long our articles are; if your users don’t like it, they won’t read it. On the other hand, provided you are offering quality content, a longer article means you get to give more value to the reader, include more outbound links, get the reader to spend more time on your site, and even throw in more keywords.
Perhaps one of the most powerful reasons why long-form content is such a good idea is that users are more likely to bookmark your content in Chrome. That will definitely improve the ranking of your site.
Tools to help
When it comes to creating interesting, relevant, and useful information, it is understandable that you may not be inherently good at it. In that case, here are some tools you can use to help you get the job done.
Australianwritings.net – This is an Australian writing service that provides great articles for websites based in Australia and beyond. They specialize in academic and highly specialized topics where lots of research is needed.
A Writer – If you’re looking for a service that will write high-quality blog articles for you, then it’s hard to go wrong with A Writer, which can provide articles on just about any topic under the sun.
BestEssays – BestEssays offers great long-form content on any topic you want. They have a large team of writers that conduct in-depth research and give you authoritative articles on the subject of your choice. They’ll even give you advice on keywords and links.
2. Improve the Load Speed of your Page
Google and Bing’s algorithms factor in the load speed of your page into the ranking of your site. If users feel like they have to wait too long for your page to load, then they will likely leave, even if that load time is extended by just a few seconds. When the dwell time goes down, so does the ranking of your page.
Fortunately, there are numerous ways to improve how fast your page loads, including caching the plug-ins, or reducing them altogether, refactoring your code, optimizing the sizes of images, and minimizing the number of redirects.
When you use images that are optimized to be both smaller in size and better in quality, you increase your conversion rate. Photographs also appeal to the emotions of your readers and improve their experience. But don’t let them get in the way of your page’s load speed.
3. Add Outbound Links
In order to increase the relevance of your content, you should link out to sites with more information on specific topics and also plenty of authority. When you link to authoritative sites, your content seems relevant while Google tends to see your site as more trusted and improves your SEO ranking. Try not to outdo it with the outbound links, however, as too many can be distracting.
4. Get rid of Broken Links
Nobody likes a 404 error. These broken links seriously compromise the usability of your site. Search engines will also consider it a sign that your site is old or neglected. There are plenty of tools you can use to go through your website and tell you where all the broken links are, like the Google Webmaster Tool and the Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
5. Make your Pages Readable
It doesn’t matter how educated your audience is; the last thing they want is to feel like they’re going through a dissertation when reading your content. Don’t give them the opportunity to give up halfway through reading your content and leave.
To increase the chances that your users will read your content to the end, make it easy to read for them. Again, there are plenty of tools to help you in this respect, including the Readability Test Tool and Readability-Score.com.
6. Optimize your Website for Mobile
Google will penalize your site if it is not optimized for mobile by lowering your ranking on the search engine results pages. The number of mobile users consuming internet content is only going up, and so it only makes sense to optimize your site for mobile.
7. Use Social Sharing to your Advantage
The amount of social sharing your content has is also a factor that affects the ranking of your website. You should install social sharing buttons to allow users that like your content to share it with friends and family. This improves their overall experience and also gets your site a higher ranking.
8. Have a Contact US Page
Google actually finds sites with contact information to be more trustworthy, and that means that such sites are likely to rank higher.
By including contact information in its own dedicated page, you improve user experience while also potentially getting you’re a higher ranking from Google.
Conclusion
Ultimately, there is no single big thing you can do to make your site better. There are only plenty of little things you can do that improve your site little by little and increase the chances of a higher search ranking. All it takes is a bit of due diligence and a focus on improving the experience for your users. The rest will follow almost effortlessly.
