Irrespective of how beautifully designed your website is, it will not be of help to your business if it is not search engine optimized. The search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and Google are quite objective when it comes to SEO. This is why you need to boost your search engine optimization if you want the search engine crawlers to index and rank your website higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). When your website appears on the topmost position of the search results, you will notice a significant increase in the number of visitors and this will, in turn, boost your conversion rates. There are different techniques that you can use to boost your search engine rankings. Here are some SEO tips that will help your website rank higher.
Keywords
One of the most essential SEO tactics is the placement of keywords throughout your website. It is important that website owners take into account how online users would search for data on a specific product or service that your business is offering and the keywords that they are likely to use are the ones that you need to include in your website content. However, you must ensure that you do not add lots of keywords, especially if they are not related. This is because your website may be flagged as spam and the search engine crawlers tend to ignore keyword stuffing.
Mobile optimization
Google started penalizing websites that are not mobile friendly in April 2015 by lowering their search engine rankings. Over the years, the number of online users consuming virtual content through mobile devices has increased significantly and being mobile friendly will affect user experience and website conversion rates. Having a mobile site is crucial, especially for B2B marketers as such sites rank higher in the SERPs. Research has proven that 77% of executives use a smartphone to research on the best services and products for their companies. If your website has been in existence for many years, you can use webmaster tools to ensure that it is mobile compliant.
Page titles
The title tags are normally used by the search engines to display pages in the search results and it also appears at the top of the browser. These tags are important because they inform the users and the search engine crawlers what your website is really about. Google tends to display only 50 to 60 characters in the title tags. Therefore, it is crucial that you keep these descriptions relevant, compelling, and precise. Page topics and keywords should always feature at the front.
Include ALT tags
You must ensure that every video or image on your website is accompanied by descriptive words on its imprint. These words are known as alternative text descriptions. ALT tags allow the search engines to locate your webpage using the specific keywords that are found on your video or image descriptions and the usual text throughout your website. ALT tags will increase the probabilities of a website being found and it will consequently boost its page rankings.
Publish relevant and engaging content
Quality content is the driver of your SERP rankings and there will never be an alternative for great content. Quality content that is specifically created for your target users will help to increase your website traffic and will improve the relevance and authority of your website. It is important that you identify the right keywords for all your webpages. Put yourself in the shoes of your readers and determine the keywords that they will use when searching for your products and services. You can then use these keywords several times throughout your text and ensure to use heading tags, bold, italics, and any other emphasis tags to highlight these keyword phrases. You should never sacrifice quality content for search engine optimization. This is because the best webpages are written for the users, and never for the search engine crawlers.
Page load speed
Major search engines like Bing and Google will consider page-loading speed in their website ranking algorithm. Online users will likely leave your website if they have to wait for several seconds for every page to load. This can affect your website dwell time, increase the bounce rates, and lower the number of pages that are viewed. All these factors will negatively affect your SEO ranking in the long run. You can increase your page load speed by using caching plug-ins, minimizing redirects, optimizing image sizes, ensuring that your code is streamlined and clean, and reducing the number of plugins. Buy SEO services and enjoy a faster loading website.
Image optimization
Research has proven that using premium quality images can boost your conversion rates. Optimizing your images properly can help you to take advantage of using pictures to increase trust and boost your user experience without hindering the load time that could affect your SEO rankings. Apart from image sizing and image file format, there are other different ways that you can ensure that your images work for you with regard to search engine optimization. You can increase the relevancy of your images content to the major search engines by using keywords for your alt tags, title, caption, description and image files. Boost conversion rates by using high-quality content throughout your website.
Utilize different multimedia
In addition to text, you must ensure that your website contains images, slideshows, audio, and videos. This will help to enrich the experience of your users and it will allow you to deliver information in a manner that is suitable to your target site visitors. Various multimedia will also act as signals of premium quality content to the search engines. With different forms of media on your website, you will be confident that your content will appear interactive and good to both users and search engine crawlers. Today, video marketing has become an integral element that drives user engagement and boosts conversion rates. Research has shown that websites that utilize video media achieve a conversion rate that is 4.8% higher when compared to about 2.9% websites that do not include videos as part of their content.
Use outbound links
To make your website content more relevant and useful, you need to link out to authority websites for detailed information that your virtual readers may need. Linking your web content to reputable authority websites will help to increase the relevance of your content and will boost the time that visitors spend on your business site. In addition, outbound links also send trust signals to the search engines such as Google and help to improve your SEO ranking. However, you should always remember that using too many outbound links can be quite distracting for your users and it will make your content to be too challenging to get through.
Broken links
No online user wants to get a 404 page when they click on any link on the internet. Broken links are bad for website usability. The search engines such as Google consider a website that has lots of broken links to be neglected and old, and this can significantly affect your website SEO ranking. Fortunately, you do not have to check every single webpage on your site or test your links manually. There are countless apps and tools that you can use to ascertain that your website is devoid of any broken links, for example, Google Webmaster Tool, W3C Link Checker, and Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
Website formatting and layout
A user-friendly website layout and correct formatting will assist in improving user experience and it will make your content easy to read and digest. As a result, your readers will spend more time on your website and will consume the information on your site. Formatting can also assist in dramatically boosting the usability of a webpage by making your content easy to read.
To guarantee usability, you should use typography and font size that is easy to read. In addition, you should use bold colors and type strategically and sparingly in your content to highlight crucial information and make your web content easy to scan through. You should also use short paragraphs and adequate line spacing. In addition, use numbered or bulleted lists to ensure clarity and ascertain that your content is broken down into sections with subheadings.
Readability
Even if your target audiences are well-educated, you do not want them to be interpreting PhD dissertations whenever they visit your website and read your content. Furthermore, you do not want your readers to give up reading your data and click away just because the content is too difficult for them to digest. When you make your content easy to read and comprehend, you will be confident that it is useful to all your readers. Some SEO experts believe that the search engines also consider readability when ranking webpages. There are different tools that you can use to test the readability of your content, for example, The Readability Test Tool, Readability-Score.com, and Readability statistics in MS Word.
Even though Google may not use social sharing in their algorithms, this does not mean that social shares do not boost SEO. Since Google crawlers also track Twitter and Facebook, it will see all the shared content. Social sharing is also an important tool that will drive brand awareness. The more awareness and visibility your brand gets, the higher the number of prospective clients and customers that will be searching for your company. This will signal Google to give more weight to your content, which will ultimately boost your search engine rankings. To ensure that people share your content with ease, you should add social sharing buttons to your webpages and blogs. You can even request your audience to directly share your website content. However, you should not overdo it as it will appear overly self-promotional and spammy. With all these tips in mind, you will enjoy better rankings and increased website traffic.
