Who doesn’t want to be on the first page of Google? All marketers desire to be on the top of the Search Engine Results Page. Being on top translates to the fact that your website is getting the lion’s share of web traffic. This gives you more chances of your post getting clicks.
For marketers, this equates to the company they represent getting long-term exposure compared to ads and more recognition for their brands with less advertising cost. That is why big companies invest a lot of time and effort in improving their ranking on Google.
Although SEO is being considered as one of the hardest parts of marketing to succeed in, it doesn’t mean that it is not possible to boost your way up higher in the ranking. In fact, it doesn’t need to be complicated and it can be done in a few hours of work.
Here is a list of small measures that you can do to improve your SEO rankings;
1. Try using Latent Semantic Indexing
Do this by typing keywords or phrases of keywords and read the first 5 articles on the Search Engine Results Page. They are on the top 5 as Google considers them the top articles providing answers to the search that you did. Check words that they have in common. Google answers your search queries by associating words to specific words or phrases. Google thinks they have the same topic when these words are frequently found together in the same context. This is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).
For example, for coffee, you can have “coffee brands,” “coffee beans,” “best coffee”,
“types of coffee”, “coffee benefits” and “ground coffee” as LSI keywords.
They are not synonyms but relevant to the word coffee so it’s a good idea to put them into your post naturally and logically.
2. Form your Content for Readability
It is important to structure your content so it makes the article content reader-friendly and that will also help decrease your bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that leave your website (or “bounce” back to the search results or referring website) after viewing only one page on your site.
You can make sure that visitors stay on your page and help decrease bounce rate by using H2, H3 and H4 headers. You can also make the text bold and italicize it to break up long paragraphs of text or to give emphasis on a particular sentence. Emojis can also bring fun, colour and familiarity to your content. Use images to break down the wall of text. Use bullet points to lessen the need to add unnecessary filler words.
All of these will help your content to become more readable not only to humans but to the Google bots that do the SEO rankings. By using keywords in your headers, you are telling Google the keywords that you would like to rank for.
3. Fix your broken Links
A broken link or dead link is a hyperlink on a webpage that no longer works for the following reasons;
An incorrect URL was entered for the link by the website owner.
The destination website removed the linked web page (causing what is known as a 404 error)
The destination website or web page permanently moved or no longer exists.
The user has software or is behind a firewall that blocks access to the destination website.
The website owner is linked to a site that is behind a firewall that does not allow outside access. Intranet sites or restricted access areas are good examples).
Having broken links on your website affects user experience as well as your reputation. It is somewhat synonymous with having a badly maintained website.
It sends a subconscious signal to the website visitor that your site is not trustable. This message is not only being perceived by your site visitors but by the Google bot as well. This tells Google that your website is not providing the much-needed answers to the searches being done and it will surely harm your ranking.
4. Do your Meta-Description
Yoast SEO defines meta description as a snippet of up to about 155 characters – a tag in HTML – which summarizes a page’s content. Search engines show it in search results mostly when the searched-for phrase is within the description so optimizing it is crucial for on-page SEO.
Although the meta description doesn’t have much to do with SEO ranking, however it does have an impact on your site visitor when clicking on your content if they see that you have an interesting meta-description. The primary objective is to make your site visitor want to click and learn more by planting a seed of curiosity so that they are motivated to find out.
Make sure to write an attention-grabbing meta-description to ensure that your potential site visitor will choose your content over the others.
5. Republish Old Content
Do more with the content you already have by republishing it. It is a fact that there is a lot of content that ends up being unread or being missed no matter how great the article can be. It can be the topic or the headline didn’t match up with the information your audience need for that moment.
So instead of writing new ones, bring back old content to the front lines and maybe the timing may be right for your site visitors. You can update the information or just make them better than the old one and republish it under a new date. Google will just then view this as a new set of fresh info and not old content.
6. Make your Content a Priority
This may be a familiar experience for some who are surfing through the internet and come across a website with an ad practically placed everywhere on the website. Definitely, not a great experience for the site visitor and the owner can say hello to an increased bounce rate.
It is really tempting for website owners to put multitude pop-ups, Google ads or even ads of your own but you’ll end up losing more than gaining. Bombarding your site visitors with ads will surely turn them away from your site as their purpose of doing a Google search is to get information and not to read a digital billboard.
Make your content a priority so you can establish a trustworthy relationship with your site visitors. This will decrease your bounce rate and increase your chances of converting that site visitor into a lead.
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