Are you looking for ways to steer more traffic in your direction? Did you know that 75% of people never go to the second page of search engine results? Getting enough hits on your website is a major struggle for many content creators. The amount of audience you get on your page can either make or break you, because only an ample amount of traffic gets your website off its feet and propels it into motion.
If you’re aiming to get your website on the first page on Google search, using the proper techniques to increase search engine optimization is a must. This also applies if you want more sales through your website, or a larger audience for the blog posts you write.
Unfortunately, SEO techniques are rapidly changing and evolving to be more effective, so the methods you knew about a couple of years ago are no longer going to work as efficiently in today’s internet arena.
That’s why you need to stay on top of your game when it comes to adapting to new SEO strategies. Fail to do so and your website will lag behind in the search engine optimization race before you know it. Here are SEO Resellers Canada, we know how to keep your website ranking high on search result pages. We also provide quality assistance in how you can revamp and upgrade your content to be more relevant and garner more clicks.
Why is it so important to learn how to improve SEO? Without it, your website won’t attract any organic traffic. You won’t get high rankings, sales, or views, so your content will go unnoticed among the world wide web of endless information.
It may take time, effort, research and multiple improvisations, but once you’ve adapted some easy SEO techniques, you’ll be able to build onto them and bring your website to the first page.
We’ve put together some of the latest SEO techniques that are sure to enhance your website’s probability of showing up in major search engines. Here’s a list of effective SEO techniques you’ll be learning about in this article.
Content
1- Unlocking the Potential of Keywords
Keywords are the primary way to have the most amount of traffic headed towards your website. Making sure you’re smart about what keywords you use is essential if you want to show up in search results.
Although smart keyword choices have been an integral part of SEO, it only becomes more and more influential as the internet expands. While short-tailed keywords were once enough to optimize your website, now, long-tailed keywords play an important role in getting your content noticed.
When deciding which keywords you should be using for your website, you need to make them relevant and search-able. Go for keywords that you know people are looking up, whether that’s by browsing through popular Q&A websites or using SEO tools. You can make a list of relevant keywords that are directly related to the kind of blog you have. If you have a list of around 50+ keywords that can be used in any of the blogs that your website creates, you’ll have a set list to refer to when working to improve website SEO.
It’s important to remember that keyword stuffing is never a good idea because it can get your website removed. Be careful with how many times you mention the same phrase. Instead, use a variety of keywords that can all relate to the topic at hand, by referring to the list you have made. Too much repetition can be a turn off for your readers as well because your content may not look original.
Think Like Your Audience
Many times, the reason why our website doesn’t get enough hits is because we aren’t putting ourselves in our audience’s shoes. In order to have valuable keywords that automatically direct people to our page, we need to think of the way our audience does.
Did you know that approximately 50% of people will switch to voice-based searches instead of typing out their questions? This means that keywords are no longer going to be short, 3-word phrases, but rather properly spoken out sentences.
This coupled with the fact that Google’s voice recognition is improvising and picking up more and more accents daily, means that you’ll have a much larger audience if you make sure your website is accessible and refers to several different variations of the same primary keyword.
If your website is about modest fashion for women, think of appropriate keywords that women would search up when looking for fashion-related articles. Phrases like “modest fashion trends in 2019” or “best modest outfit ideas for women” might get you a larger organic audience than keywords like “modest fashion” or “outfit ideas.”
Another way to learn more about what questions are being asked by your target audience is to visit Q&A sites. Sites like Reddit and Quora are filled with questions and concerns from people all over the world, and of different ages and genders. These sites give you an idea of what kind of keywords people are most likely to search up.
Go through Google suggestions to find keyword ideas as well. When you search up a topic, other similar topics will come up in the form of suggestions, which make ideal keyword options. Google suggestions are generated from similar things that people have searched up, related to the topic that you’re searching about. This helps you get a perspective of your field that you may not have been aware of.
Work on Your Titles, Metas and Images
What website are you most likely to click on? One that has no description when it shows up in a search engine’s result or one that clearly indicates what it’s about and why you should click on it to learn more? Search results that have proper meta descriptions, complete with proper keyword placement are more likely to gain hits than ones that don’t offer any kind of introduction.
When you’re writing out your meta description, make sure you use the phrases that are most likely to
appeal to your target audience. The meta title is the main resource that you have to draw people onto your website, so be careful about what words you choose to place in it. Having the keyword in the meta title is extremely important.
You should also optimize your images with respect to the keyword. You’re not only getting readers through other blogs, social media and search engines. You’re also getting readers that search up certain images that are relevant to your website’s niche. These images then lead readers back to your website.
Having alt tags is also essential, because it makes your content accessible to those who are screen-only readers. It also makes it easier for search engines to find your content. There are numerous different ways for a search engine to pick up your website to show in search results, so make sure you aren’t leaving any of the options unexplored.
2- Encourage Content Sharing
One very important, yet often unexplored way of getting more organic website hits is to make your content shareable. Anything in your content that hits a nerve with your audience is more likely to be spread far and wide to people that they know, as opposed to generic content that lacks personality.
One way you can make your content more shareable is by placing quotes throughout the text that are sure to grab your audience’s attention and incline them towards sharing your work. You can have a catchy phrase, a staggering statistic or a quote by an influential personality that many people know about. People love sharing content that feels relatable and strikes a chord with them.
When working towards enhancing your audience’s website experience, make sure to add buttons. If your content is worth sharing but has no option to share to different social media platforms, people aren’t going to make an effort.
Not many readers are willing to go the extra mile and share your page’s link directly, so you have to make the sharing process more convenient in order for them to send your content to their friends and family.
Adding a call-to-action is one effective way to get your content shared as well. When people are through with reading your entire article, they are going to need a brief reminder of what the purpose of your article was and what they can do with the information they’ve gathered. With a convincing CTA, you’ll have more people on board that actually know what your content aims to achieve.
Although it’s important to encourage people to share your content, don’t ruin their visitor experience by making your website inaccessible. Many websites use a tactic of locking their content until the reader makes an account or logs in through a social media account. It’s always a bad idea to cut readers off from the content you promised them when they saw your site in the search results, and chances are they’re never going to click on your website in the future. Your aim should be to make your visitors have a valuable experience on your website, while trying to get them to share your content at the same time.
3- Renovate Your Website
People don’t like staying on a website that takes too long to load or isn’t mobile friendly. When faced with the decision of looking through two separate that have similar content, no one is going to linger on a site that doesn’t open fast enough.
Opt for images that are compressed, so they load faster and bring life to your website. However, images aren’t the only aspect of a website that can slow it down. There are certain files and database problems that can cause a website to lag as well.
You should also have a few videos in your content, because sometimes, people are more willing to watch a video that explains something rather than reading about it.
Did you know video marketing is four times more likely to be viewed by potential customers than just a text-based description of the product?
In case you haven’t noticed already, makeup is almost always marketed through videos that describe the user’s hands-on experience of it, rather than just images of the products.
Having unnecessary add-ons to your website can be another reason that it works slower than other sites. If you have plugins or extensions that are causing more harm than good to your website’s first impression, work towards limiting your use of them.
If you want your website to appeal to the largest potential audience possible, you have to ensure that it’s capable of working on cell phones. Most people search things up through their phone and not their laptops or PCs, so by having a website that isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re restricting them from having access to your content.88% of search engine searches come from smartphones, so you really need to up your game if you don’t want to lose a huge expanse of traffic.
Not making your website fast and mobile-friendly is going to increase its bounce rate, because people are going to leave as soon as they see that it’s wasting their time. One way that you can counter the bounce rate is by having a custom 404 page that keeps people on your site even when the site has crashed or has encountered an unknown error.
Have a redirect option that takes readers to another page, links them to the products section of your website if you’re a seller, or lets them take a short quiz until they’re able to access your content again. This enhances user experience even when they didn’t get to read what they were looking for.
If you feel like your website needs serious renovations, you might want to consider switching to a different host. It’s possible that the current host that you’re using is inefficient and unable to handle the add-ons, images and scripts you have on your site. Reducing the size of your web page file may also make a difference.
According to Google statistics, websites that load faster make up the majority of results that show up on the first page, because no one wants to wait on a website that takes too long to load. One way to make sure that your website is optimized for working on mobile phones is to use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool, which assesses your website for you.
“Did you know that sites that aren’t mobile-friendly are automatically rated down in search results? Well, now you can ensure you aren’t losing out because of something that can easily be corrected.”
4- Don’t Forget Your Links!
There are different ways to use links in an article. You can link to other pages on your website by using anchor words that double as keywords. When you add more pages to your website, keep interlinking the pages to make sure your potential audience can find both your newer and older content. You can go back to your old pages and link to your new pages as well, so all your content is up to date.
“It’s more important that you link to an authoritative website than to several, smaller website. The reliability of the source that you’re linking to is more important than whether you link to many different sites, because it can give you a much higher rank on search engines.”
One valuable link is enough for you to gain hundreds of more links, and that too, organically. Your links shouldn’t only be on your homepage, but to the other pages on your website as well. This shows people what kind of content your website consists of, apart from just the landing page. When people are redirected to a page on your website, they’re more likely to explore further than if they only land on a homepage which provides no information about what kind of content the website has.
It’s also very important that you keep checking up on your content and making sure you don’t have any dead or broken links. Websites with broken links are annoying and are more likely to increase the chances that people don’t spend much time on your page.
One technique to keep in mind is to include the name of the destination as the anchor text when adding links. Rather than ask readers to “click here to today!” ask them to visit the website, with its full name as the link.
That way, people know what they’re about to click on rather than be unsure of where the link will lead them. You’re more likely to get readers who actually stay on the destination page and have a reduced bounce rate as well, because they will know what they’re about to start reading.
“There are two main kinds of links: internal links and backlinks. Internal links lead people to other pages on your own website, while backlinks take you to sites apart from your own website. Make sure to assess your website for any broken links as well. Google also prefers that you have links distributed throughout your content rather than only at the end or the beginning of your text.”
You should also link your images as well, whether they redirect your readers to other pages on your website or to external sources. Remember, when people looking through search results, the images are also an important medium for them to reach your content.
Get In Touch with Influential Content Creators
If your website caters to a specific audience, you should find influential people that are most likely to get the attention of that audience. For example, if your website is all about different cuisine ideas and recipes, try to get a respected chef to interview for your blog and have them share it on their social media.
“Influencers bring in a large, yet specific audience. If you’re going for a workout influencer and get them to interview for your blog before you sell a new edition of dumbbells, they’ll create the hype you need. When they share your content on their page, you’re going to get several organic hits from the audience that follows them.”
If you notice any influencer or blogger sharing your content, make the effort to get in touch with them and build a partnership. It’s possible that their niche is similar to yours, so you can mutually benefit each other in gaining a larger audience.
You can start by sending them more blogs from your website that are similar to the one they were interested in.
Getting as much of your content shared on social media is the key for the coming years. While currently, search engines are the primary way for people to get access to your content, creating 300% more traffic than social media, it is a rapidly growing medium that is only going to generate more traffic in the future. Focus on content creators who relate directly to your target audience so people who follow them and have similar interests as them can share and view content that appeals to all of them.
5- Use SEO Tools
Using SEO tools helps to drastically improve your blog’s rankings and probability to be clicked on by potential readers. SEO tools are designed to analyze your website for what works, what doesn’t and what you can do to make improvements and optimize your content.
You may think that making an account on Google Analytics means that Google has access to more information about your website, but that isn’t true. Google knows everything about your content, regardless of whether you sign up for an Analytics account or not. Having an account just makes it more convenient for you to have more insight on what you can do to enhance your reader’s experience and get more views.
Google Analytics will also tell you which of your website’s pages create the best impressions on readers and which pages readers are most likely to read all the way through. You’ll know what kinds of headers and titles people are more inclined to click on, which will help you alter your meta descriptions and titles in all your future posts to increase your click-rate.
Search engine optimization isn’t only about getting a higher ranking on search page results. It’s also about having content that draws readers in, and you may not be aware of certain problems in your website that are increasing the bounce rate. With SEO tools, you’ll know exactly what needs to change in order to improve your website’s popularity and accessibility.
Other SEO tools that come in handy for generating keywords, coming up with topic ideas and tracking the number of hits each keyword gets are Ubersuggest and Moz. It’s impossible to be up to date with the best SEO techniques as they rapidly change and undergo major upgrades. Only an SEO tool that is designed specifically to monitor your website, the number of clicks and the type of content you post is going to help you rank higher and remain there.
You can enter your website’s domain address and get started with making the necessary changes!
6- Optimize Your Content
It’s important to let Google know that you’re regularly updating and maintaining your website. In order to be higher up in the SEO rankings, a website needs to be active.
Your blogs should also be longer, more descriptive and with more images and videos to enhance a reader’s experience. A blog that’s only 200-300 words long is not going to get any reads, because it doesn’t even have enough content to place keywords in. A successful blog is usually 1500-3000 words long and is informative and helpful to go through.
One way to make sure your content is always relevant, new and likely to be read is by keeping up to date with current trends. Like we’ve mentioned before, Reddit, Quora and Google suggestions are a great place to start. The Q&A sites give you endless ideas of what kind of things people are currently debating over and thinking about. You can make blogs about anything that’s a hot topic among your target audience these days.
Google suggestions and Ubersuggestgive you more insight about what people are searching up that’s almost similar to the kind of content you have. Not only do you get more keyword ideas, like we discussed, but you also get different viewpoints on how people approach the topic that you want your website to be based on. With an endlessly changing perspective, you can make your website the number one site to refer to for a certain niche.
The more you update your content, even old content that you wrote before, the more likely it is for your website to rank higher.
Among the most helpful SEO writing techniques, there’s the strategy of using catchy connectors in between your paragraphs. When people are reading long articles, there are chances that they are going to get bored or contemplate leaving your website when the content no longer feels interesting.
Of course, no content can feel interesting throughout, especially when it’s a large article of up to 3000 words. For articles like these, the smart step to take is to add fillers that keep people wanting to read more. Because of our short attention spans, you have to spread these fillers out across the entire article.
For example, when you start your article you may want to consider “keep reading this article to know why buying from a thrift store could be your biggest mistake,” or “later on in this article, we’re going to talk more about how your entire childhood was a lie.” When you mention phrases like these consistently throughout your article, you’re going to create a longer time duration that people spend on your page.
“Another important content writing technique is to use multiple different kinds of keywords within one blog or article. This ensures that even people who were looking for something slightly similar to your topic have a chance of coming across your content. Remember, using SEO tools to come up with different similar keyword ideas to include in one blog post can be greatly increase your traffic.”
Add different writing and visual effects throughout your content as well. In a long-form blog post, people aren’t going to keep reading unless they see something visually different to recapture their attention. Have quotes in italics, insert interesting links and statistics and make important text bold, so it catches a reader’s attention even as they quickly peruse through your content.
As the internet grows, so do people’s requirements for what truly constitutes as valuable content. It isn’t just about what they can read, they need to be able to get a more 3D experience of what you’re writing about as well.
The Bottom Line
If you’ve made it to the end of this blog, congratulations! You’re not a little more aware of how to increase SEO and make your website rank higher and get more views. Just remember these 6 basic SEO techniques:
- Focus on your keywords.
- Get people to share your content.
- Upgrade your website.
- Include links in your blogs.
- Take advantage of SEO tools.
- Have valuable and relevant content that people want to read.
SEO Resellers Canada specializes in helping your website reach the first page of search engine results. We know what you’re doing right, and how you can do more of it, in order to get the maximum amount of traffic headed towards your content!
