Improving your site’s SEO is an important part of boosting traffic to your site, especially since approximately 90 percent of online activities begin with a search. Boosting your SEO ranking can seem intimidating, but these tips can help you get started.
Optimize for Mobile Users
More and more people are using their phones instead of their computers for internet use, so if your site has not been optimized for mobile use, you are missing out on a big opportunity.
Google has a mobile-first index, so part of their ranking system depends on how mobile-friendly your site is.
When you work on optimizing your site for mobile use, think about what the top tasks users will want to use are. Think about the top three to five objectives visitors to your site have and make sure those are running smoothly on mobile devices.
Speed
Search engines will factor in the speed of your pages load in their ranking algorithms. If your site takes an extra few seconds to load, a visitor may get impatient and move onto the next site in their search results.
Some ways you can work to increase your speed are by optimizing image sizes, caching plug-ins, minimizing page redirects, and streamlining your code. Images and plug-ins are two of the more common reasons websites lag, so optimizing your images and caching those plug-ins are a great way to optimize your SEO.
Links
Adding relevant links to your content is another helpful way to boost your SEO ranking. Avoid “click here” links, they do nothing for your SEO, instead go for descriptive links that link your keyword to keywords on the site you are linking to. Doing this will help with your SEO ranking and the ranking of the site you are linking to. It will also add more value for the people reading your site.
Using internal links between pages on your site is also helpful to your SEO. It will help answer the questions of your page visitors and allow them to make more connections on your site, and it will help with your SEO.
Quality Content
If you do not make any updates to your site after day one, your SEO ranking will probably be hurting. Visitors are not going to keep returning to a site that never changes, so producing high-quality content on a regular basis will give them a reason to return.
When you work on your content, think about what keywords are most relevant to that page and make sure you include them in the content. Put that phrase in the content multiple times; once or twice in the opening and closing paragraphs, and two to four more in the rest of the content. Make it feel natural, like you are not forcing the phrase into the content where it is really unnecessary.
Blogging
Having a blog on your site is a great way to help improve your SEO. Posting a blog weekly will bring in that fresh content regularly, and it can help you retain traffic in addition to bringing new traffic to your website.
When you have a blog on your site, you will be able to use more keywords, which will help with your ranking, and it will give you the opportunity to use more organic links, so they will not feel forced.
Having a blog will also help establish you as an expert in your niche, which can also help boost traffic to your site.
Encourage Social Media Sharing
Social media is an important part of marketing for any business and encouraging sharing on social media can help increase your SEO ranking. This is because getting more shares means you are getting more traffic to your site, which in turn helps boost your ranking.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to include sharing icons for social media on all of your content. Another is by sharing links on your own social media, and from there it only takes one click to bring traffic to your site.