By Joseph Dalton
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is an ever-changing scene. With the likes of Google continually evolving their algorithms, you cannot afford to let your SEO strategies slide. However, there are some top-ranking factors that, no matter how much the SEO scene changes, will always be relevant in getting your SEO rankings up – here is an overview of them.
Encourage Backlinks
Google has long used the inbound links on your site as a gauge to determine how trustworthy your site is. These links can carry a huge amount of weight over your SEO results – but only if they’re the right kind of backlinks. Backlinks are links from sites that are linking back to you. In order to get relevant site links, you need to be actively guest blogging with relevant and complementary authority sites, as well as creating shareable and useful content on your own site.
The one thing you should never do, is use black-hat techniques to get your backlinks – as Google WILL heavily penalize you!
Understand that Content IS king
Producing high quality, relevant content should be a natural part of your working week. If you’re looking to grow your business, you’ll automatically be posting useful information on your site, in the guise of blogs and/or articles – and this will go a long way towards helping your SEO.
If you’re writing tailored content, it stands to reason that you’ll be automatically using specific keywords and phrases that are relevant to your niche in your content too – and search engines will love this – as long as you keep producing content on a regular, consistent basis.
Keep Your Titles and Subheadings Relevant
Using keyword-rich meta titles will help search engines understand what type of traffic to send your way. Make sure all of your titles are not only catchy and appealing, but keyword relevant too!
Be Mobile Friendly
Google is heavily penalizing those websites that aren’t mobile friendly. Why – because more and more website visits are made via a smartphone or portable device. If your site isn’t yet mobile friendly, you’re seriously damaging the health of your SEO ratings.
Make Your Website Clear
Search engines want to provide relevant information to their users, but if your content isn’t clearly labelled, they’re going to bypass you, in favor of others that are. How you label your content is relevant to search engines and your visitors. Make sure everything on your website is clearly labelled – from your navigation, right through to your images and graphics.
Improve Site Speed
We’re living in a world of instant gratification, and our online browsing habits are no different. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, you could potentially be losing a whopping 40% of your visitors! This makes optimizing your site speed something that needs checking every couple of months. Using an image compression plugin will help, as images can be a big culprit, when it comes to slowing down your site loading times.
Streamlining the elements within your site is another – so even more reason to go through your site and take out everything that is surplus to requirements.
Although SEO techniques and algorithms change on a frequent basis, the tips above will always be relevant to the SEO health of your site. If you take the time to regularly check and implement them, you’ll find your site will always be seen in a more favorable light by the various search engines – and your website visitors will benefit from the improvements too.
