Are you looking to get more traffic to your website? Mastering SEO techniques can help you achieve better search rankings and reach your target audience
What’s the best SEO technique to grow your online business in 2023? SEO of course!
SEO isn’t dead, it’s alive and well. In fact, it plays an important role in all kinds of businesses, big or small.
You need people to find you on the internet, which means you need SEO to help people find you on search engines.
But, how can you improve your ranking in search engines like Google so that more people will find your business via organic (non-paid) search?
The answer is better SEO practices and techniques – and that’s what we’re going to cover in this post.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization, a set of practices used to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results.
Organic search is when people discover and access online content, making it essential for improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.
Why is SEO important?
Today, there are over billions of Google search results.
You’ll notice that if you search “Rio Olympics 2016”. There are over 2.860 billion results.
That’s right! Over 2 billion of these are irrelevant to the query or the person’s search intent.
To cut through the dust and clutter of search engine results, you need SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
The best way to rank your website is by implementing SEO techniques.
Visibility
When users search for a service or product online, they are more likely to choose one of the top five results that search engines show them.
Search engine optimization (SEO) helps you rank higher in search results and garner more visibility online, making potential customers more likely to click over to your site and convert.
Organic Traffic
Search engine optimization increases your organic search engine traffic, which in turn increases the number of visitors your site sees each day.
This directly correlates with an increase in sales – because the more relevant people that see your site, the more likely you are to sell to them.
Trustworthiness
A higher SEO score equates to more traffic to your site. While higher rankings on Google are appealing to all brands because of the increased visibility, a second-hand benefit is the trust customers place in your company.
7 SEO Best Techniques for Better Rankings
Want to improve your search rankings and traffic? These SEO techniques will help you rank higher, stay there longer, and get more visitors in the process.
1. Diagnose and resolve page speed issues.
If your website pages load slowly, users will abandon them before they even have a chance to read the information you provide. Google considers this when ranking pages.
Before we begin optimizing your site, we need to diagnose the reason for the slow page speed. Even if you think your website is loading quickly, it’s always beneficial to be sure by running Google’s Page Speed Insights test on your site.
Here are some SEO techniques you can use to troubleshoot slow site speed:
- Compressed Images: Even though you might think big, high-quality images look great on your site, they significantly slow down the load time.
- Check for link redirects: Check for broken links on your site. When someone clicks on a broken link, the server has to visit an extra page before arriving at the correct one. Redirects may slow down the loading time of a page, so you should try to keep them to a minimum.
- Check on your server: If your website is hosted on a shared server, you may find that the performance of your website is sometimes slow.
2. Optimize your user experience.
To be ranked highly in search results, Google wants visitors to your website to have a positive experience.
The following are some of the factors that affect the quality of your website’s user experience (UX):
- Include multimedia content in your content.
To create more visually appealing content, use images or videos. These can be embedded on the page directly or linked to a website where they can be accessed.
- Make sure your navigation bar is working correctly.
- When designing a website, the navigation bar should be given top consideration. It should contain only the most important links to keep users from getting lost.
- Constantly Update your website with new information.
If your website looks outdated, visitors may assume that the information on it is outdated as well.
To provide the best possible user experience, consider giving your website a refresh if it looks old!
3. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly.
Your site visitors can use a variety of devices to view your website, including desktop computers and mobile devices.
Google considers whether or not your site is mobile responsive, which means that regardless of what device a visitor uses to view your site, he or she will still get the same experience.
Mobile responsiveness can help site visitors who use a smartphone to access your site’s content.
- To create an effective mobile-friendly site, make sure buttons are large enough to be tapped by users.
- In order to ensure that your images appear well on all devices, you must add image-responsive tags.
- To ensure the best possible user experience, it’s important to hire a professional web development company.
4. Consider your website's links.
Google examines three types of links:
- Inbound links are links on other sites that point back to your own.
- Outbound links are the sites that you have linked to from your content.
- Internal links connect one page on your site to another.
Links are important to Google when determining the relevance of your website.
Inbound links from other trusted websites act as votes of confidence and outbound links show who you trust. Internal links help connect your pages together.
Quality content will always be more effective than quantity. However, you should have a high number of authoritative inbound links to show Google that you are trustworthy and can offer great information.
Similarly, you should link to trusted, high-quality websites to show Google that you only recommend great information in your content. It is also important to have tons of internal links within your content for users and search engines alike.
This practice can boost your site’s search engine rankings and keep users on your website longer.
5. Create, update, and prune content on a regular basis.
Google considers content to be one of the biggest ranking factors. Unless your site has something to rank for, it won’t be found by users, so content is extremely important.
However, you can’t simply write content and expect Google to rank it; you must take steps to ensure that your content is high-quality and appealing to users.
If you want your content to appear higher in organic search results, you will have to create content that targets important keywords in your industry. Consider the following when writing your content:
- Keyword targeting
- Internal linking
- Social media integration
- Use of media like images and video
- Headings that target keywords
6. Consider purchasing an SSL certificate for your website.
Google considers the security of a website when ranking it because that means the site can safely receive private customer information.
This is indicated by an https at the beginning of your URL instead of an http, and by the fact that you take your site visitors’ privacy seriously.
Not only will you be satisfying one of Google’s top-ranking factors, but potential customers will be happy as well.
7. If you have a new website, don’t be discouraged!
If your website is brand new, it’s unlikely to start ranking quickly. An older website gives you an advantage over newer sites in terms of search engine rankings.
New sites may have difficulty ranking against older industry giants, but this can be overcome.
Make sure that your site’s SEO is up to date by following our checklist. That way, as it ages, there is nothing standing in its way of ranking highly in search results.
Conclusion:
In order to achieve a high ranking on Google, it’s important to focus not only on search engine optimization but also on other factors that determine your web presence.
Regardless of what Google does or doesn’t say, there are many SEO-related tasks you should perform.
Some of them are simply wise to do because they don’t affect you negatively and some are ideal for the greater good.
