You don’t have to be a tech-savvy person or a multi-award winning digital marketer to improve your website’s SEO.
If anything, having a basic understanding of what SEO is all about is all you need to register your web pages on the front pages of search engines.
And by the phrase “having a basic understanding,” we mean understanding how a regular search engine algorithm thinks.
Once you can do this, it will be almost impossible for any of your competitors to outrank you on the SERPs.
Luckily for you, we’ve compiled a list of tips that you can use to appeal to the thought-compartment of search engine algorithms.
Improve your webpage User Experience (UX)
Improve user experience; improve search rankings!
Search engine algorithms believe that sites with the highest number of visits, the highest amount of time spent by visitors, pages per session, and low bounce rate are the sites that provide the best user experience.
To them, you’ve got to be offering something exciting, engaging, and solution-oriented for visitors to come, stay, and return to your site.
Sounds like simple logic, right?
If you want to improve your search rankings, just think of what you can do to make your site more enjoyable for visitors.
That is, work on your UX! A good website designer/website content developer can be a great place to start on this.
Remove keyword stuffing
Stuffing your web pages with keywords will not do you any good in terms of search ranking.
As much as you want search engine crawlers to identify your web pages for a specific keyword – one that describes what your site is about – stuffing your pages with these keywords will only portray you in the wrong lights in the face of search engine crawlers.
A better practice would be to use words/phrases that are synonymous with your target keyword.
Search engines have no business with how frequently you’ve used a specific word; they just want to rank sites based on how best they provide the answers people are looking for. To do this, they rank sites that speak about a given subject in the best of details, regardless of how frequently the site has used a certain keyword.
Get backlinks
Don’t let any marketer fool you into thinking backlinks are bad or less appreciated by search engines. As long as they’re coming from genuine and reputable sources, search engines will rank you for them.
To search engines, incoming links from high-authority domains show that there is something special and solution-oriented about your site.
Furthermore, getting backlinks to your site will also fetch you more traffic. And as we mentioned in tip #1 above, the greater the traffic coming to a site, the higher the ranking of the site.
Make your site faster
Nowadays, people don’t just want answers to their questions; instead, they want the answers in split seconds. Luckily for them, search engines recognize this. And to meet this demand, they send any site that is slow in loading its pages down the SERPs.
Sorry slow-loading sites, but the world can no longer wait for you!
If your site is still one of those sites that take forever to come up, now may be the right time to get your site up to speed with the new demand.
Find and fix broken links
If humans could get mad at the sight of a “404 error,” how do you think search engines would react to finding an error page on your site?
Disappointed!
Having quality backlinks on your site is one of the best ways to boost traffic and establish the authority of your site. So when you have poor/broken links on your site, you draw traffic away from the site, and you lose authority.
Sounds like a pretty bad scenario for someone looking to boost their search rankings. To prevent search engines from crawling broken links on your site, you can use a “link checker tool” to find any broken link on your site, and then use a guest post service to buy new links to replace them with.
Optimize for local search
More and more people are using their smartphones to search for businesses “near me.” To improve your chances of having your business show up in relevant local searches, make sure you claim your Google My Business listing, provide relevant content in Google Posts, get your business listed in local directories, and improve your online reputation with great online reviews.
Optimize for voice search
According to several studies, by 2022 half of all searches will be done by voice. Make sure those voice searchers find your business by incorporating likely voice search phrases into your website content—be sure to use full sentences phrased in a natural conversational style rather than single keywords.
