5 ways to raise your SEO ranking
Getting noticed on the Internet can feel like an immense challenge, but it is possible to improve a website and achieve this goal. Most traffic on the web still filters through major search engines, especially Google. For this purpose, the practice of search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO, has evolved. The idea behind SEO is to design a website in a fashion that suits how the automated bots that index the web see webpages. Here are 5 tips that can help raise a site’s SEO ranking:
Titles and Headers
There are two sets of HTML tags that the search bots look for first when trying to make sense of a page’s content. These are the TITLE and the H1, H2 and H3 tags. These tags denote top-level concepts that define a page’s content for the reader, and the bots place a lot of value on them. Make sure they’re not overly wordy; fewer than 55 characters should do.
Fix Any Keyword Stuffing
A lot of bad SEO work has found its way onto the Internet over the last decade, and search bots know to look for these methods. Keyword stuffing used to be popular, and many SEO professionals still use more complex versions of it. If webpages are using an excessive number of references to keyword targets, then the site’s owner may want to edit them and reduce those references. If the pages have already been penalized or aren’t attracting much traffic, then they should be removed in order to start fresh using the best industry practices.
Get Social
Social media factors are of growing importance in SEO rankings. By some estimates, as much as 30% of the SEO signal comes from social media references. For this reason, a business should have at least a basic social media presence in place. This means at least having a Facebook business page established, and it may also entail building social media accounts on sites such as Twitter or Instagram.
Internal Linking
One of the most overlooked SEO tactics is linking to a site’s own content. While it’s important to not get carried away, a couple links on every page of content should point toward something else on the website. This means that a current blog post, when appropriate, should refer back to an older post. This lets the search bots see that the content represents an ongoing conversation.
Inbound, External Links
It’s harder than ever before to get quality links coming into a website. The search engines’ requirements regarding what counts as a spam link are getting tighter with each passing year. The best strategy is to create interesting content that uses exciting titles in order to drive traffic. This is why many website owners keep a blog. A blog allows them to post intriguing articles, and then visitors who have their own sites will pass along natural inbound links to the content in question.