9 Steps to SEO Success
Some of our tips to give you that SEO boost
Recently, SEO (Search engine optimization) has become one of the most vital marketing methods. Tactically organizing your ranking on search engines will lead to more views and ultimately sales if done appropriately.
Although quick fix solutions can give fast results when talking about SEO success, but we would never recommend it, because they can damage your reputation on the long-term.
SEO & Usability
First and most important step for your site to be attractive to search engines, is to have great usability. Many parts of your site factor into this such as efficiency, effectiveness, memorability learnability, and error prevention.
If you want a seamless user experience which will lead to a much better chance at achieving SEO you have to ask yourself several questions.
Is your landing page effective in meeting your viewer’s needs? Is it operating fast enough for them? Is it easy to navigate? Will they be able to remember how to find the site again? And is your 404 error page in check?
If your site is user friendly, search engines will more probably rank you higher rich in keywords and has lots of user engagement. The more people that use your site and the longer they stay on it will show user friendliness and help with that SEO boost. So here is some of our top most tips!
1. Informative, entertaining & engaging content
As much as you provide a content that your users honestly want to ready the more you encourage them to stay longer on your site which is one of your primary goals.
To engage your audience and encourage them to revisit your site blogging is the perfect way! By racking up a word count that is rich in keywords, and that has outbound links.
Site re-visits are also an element in your general search ranking so great content is a total must. Not to mention the fact that beneficial content often gets bookmarked on Chrome and this is also a factor that will boost your SEO.
2. Loading time
Google and Bing take page-loading speed into consideration in their SEO ranking algorithm. Late loading can anger viewers and prevent them going any further with your site, thus reducing dwell time and in turn search rankings.
3. Image optimization
To help improve your overall SEO there are ways in which you can use to help the optimization of the images on your site.
You can use keywords for your image file name, alt tag, title, description and caption besides image file format and sizing.
4. Formatting
Good formatting is very necessary as nobody is going to be forced to read a whole part of text. This will improve the user experience massively and encourage users to re-visit the site which will let the search engines know just how applicable you are. Using header tags can be an easy way to break up text to make it that bit more digestible for your visitors.
Top tip: Search engines also rate keywords in header tags more heavily. By containing pertinent terms in your header tags, you are also boosting your SEO ranking against those keywords.
5. Outbound links
To make your content more beneficial and applicable, you can link out to expert sites for more detailed information your readers can use.
Linking out to well respected professional sites believed that it will send trust signals to Google and improve SEO ranking not only increase the relevancy of your content and time readers spend on your site. Yet, more is not necessarily better. Too many outbound links can be distracting and make the content hard to get through.
6. Multimedia
To enrich the user experience, images, videos, slideshows and audio can help, and will allow you to deliver the information in the most suitable way to your best site visitors.
They also act as a signal of quality content to search engines… after all, you have worked to make your content look good and interactive!
Video marketing has become progressively essential element in driving user engagement and renovation. Based on many studies it’s found that websites using videos can achieve a 4.8% higher conversion rate, compared to a 2.9% average on websites that do not use videos.
7. Broken links
Broken links make for bad usability. Who wants to get a 404 page after clicking on a link?
Noting that, Search engines consider a large number of broken links as a sign of an old, neglected site and this can affect your SEO ranking.
Gratefully, you don’t have to go through every single page on your website and test the links manually. There are many tools and apps to help guarantee that your site is free of broken links, such as: Google Webmaster Tool and Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
8. Contact us page
Having a contact page on your website adds an instant sense of legality and trust worthiness and this is something Google most absolutely considers when calculating rankings. A well-designed contact form is believed to rise engagement online and create new business opportunities. Including the contact link in the navigation of the site also makes for good usability and some potential SEO juice.
9. Mobile optimization
Recently, sites that are not enhanced for mobile have become chastened by search engines and those sites that aren’t responsive have been knocked down the ranks. Mobile has rapidly become the most popular platform to search on so not being mobile ready is going to affect your user experience and at the end of the day your sales.
If it’s been a while since your site has had a re-vamp, then it is a complete must that you check if it is responsive to mobile and tablet devices or not so that your site can have the best chance of ruling the roost in your search engine rankings.