BlogSearch Engine Optimization (SEO)

7 Easy SEO Tips to Skyrocket Your Business Growth

By Shrishti Jain
June 13, 2017

Everyone wants to achieve better search engine rankings as organic search traffic is a tested and proven technique for business growth. The main hiccup is SEO, which keeps evolving. Although it’s a good thing because you no longer require a ton of backlinks, supportive microsites, keyword stuffing or heavy usage of anchor texts to rank higher on search engines. Follow these Best SEO Techniques to Rank #1 in Search Engines. The only trouble is no one wants to be penalized by Google for not following its algorithms and trends. Google is reported to change its algorithm for a search around 500 times every year. Some are small and can be ignored, but major updates such as Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird have caused a lot of stir in the SEO community. So, the key is to perform ethical Search Engine Optimization for your website like creating user-friendly content and winning links from a credible source. For that you will have to make your website or blog more SEO Friendly and here are the best SEO practices to it.

7 Quick Tips to Make Your Website or Blog More SEO Friendly

#1. Build a Great Website/Blog

A well designed professional looking blog/website will not ensure that it gets a high amount of traffic or augment your customer base. To increase the traffic, your website design has to be SEO friendly. Here are a few crucial though easy SEO tricks to developing an SEO friendly website design:

Keywords in URLs. Use the important keyword in your URLs or file names. For example, an URL such as https://www.beautyproducts.com/products/item2?=2142 is not search engine friendly whereas https://www.beautyproducts.com/shop/haircare will make search engine happy. Also, try to limit the category to 2 or 3 in the URL and use hyphens to separate the words in the URL.
Image Optimization – Always optimize images on the website/blog along with content. You need to make sure that the images uploaded are not more than 100kb to avoid loading problems. Only upload relevant images and don’t forget to use keywords in the text section for search engines to crawl better.
Limit JavaScript – Next best thing you can do to design an SEO friendly website is limit the usage of JavaScript. There are two reasons for it, JavaScript doesn’t work well with mobile and then search engines struggle to crawl through the website with a great deal of JavaScript.
Browser Check – Your website design should be accessible on all available browsers to increase ranking with search engines. Check if the website loads slowly on some browser or has difficulty in navigation, then you need to fix it all.
Avoid Flash Elements – A website with too many flash elements tend to distract visitors, causing an abandoned page. Also flash is not friendly to search engines, so use them sparingly if required.

#2. Do Keyword Research and Place Them Appropriately

Keyword research is probably the most important factor one should consider in developing an SEO friendly blog/website. Because today, 9 out of 10 online users type a keyword on search engines to look for information.

So until you know the important words and phrases your website needs to rank, you cannot start the SEO process. There are few tools to do keyword research such as WordStream or Google Keyword Research Tool. Once you know them, place your keywords in different places within your website.

Keyword Placing Areas – If you have a certain topic with a focused keyword then make sure to place them in the title tag, H1 tags, H3 tags, title attributes of images/links, and throughout in the text. It’s the most basic form of SEO On-Page Factor.
TF-IDF – Google is using TF-IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency) technology to determine how often your keyword appears compared to the expectations a large or small document might have. This is one of the most important on-page concepts you need to consider when getting your page rank better.
Segmenting Pages – Each web page has different parts such as header, footer, sidebar etc. So where you place your keyword is more important than the keyword itself. Segmenting pages has now become even more important as users are moving towards mobile devices. So to serve these mobile users, incorporating keywords in all these areas has become prevalent.

#3. Build a Sitemap

Sitemap helps users and search engines show the structure of your site on one single page. Sitemaps serve as a way to navigate your site easier and communicate with search engines directly. In terms of SEO, a sitemap usually helps spiders find all important pages and explain your site’s hierarchy.

The key is to get your page indexed and the sitemap informs search engines about any change or update made to the website. Especially, if your site is large it’s a good practice to build several sitemap pages. There are two ways to build a sitemap –

If you have good technical knowledge then you can download and install a sitemap generator such as Google Sitemap Generator. This generator is based on Python script, so have Python 2.2 if you want to run this.
Another way to generate a sitemap is to use free online tools, which can do the job. These tools are pretty straightforward allowing you to review the crawled URLs, remove duplicate URLs, excluded URLs, and more. Just remember to include only pages that you wish the search engine should index and value.

#4. Integrated SEO Within Your Content Marketing Strategy

We understood that SEO keeps moving with updated algorithms, but a powerful SEO content strategy can never get outdated. Especially if you run an eCommerce business then chances are high that you face tough competition. To remain ahead you need to write compelling content that brings valuable traffic. And even if you are not selling anything a good piece of content will surely get inbound links. SEO friendly blogs with great content can be developed in the following pattern:

Blog Posts – A blog is one of the easiest ways to develop regular informative content. Blog posts help to generate organic traffic, attract links and build authority.
Articles – If you have a magazine kind of website, post regular articles, interviews or feature posts to drive great traffic from search engines.
Guides – Guides works excellently with “how-to” types of articles. It’s a longer piece of content than regular posts explaining how things work in detail.
Video – The future of content marketing is video marketing and more businesses are adopting videos to convey their message. As search engines also crawl videos, creating a video with competitive keywords can easily be ranked high.
Infographics – Infographics are an amazing way to incorporate a lot of data in form of pictures, graphs or charts. However, the big image size is often a problem for search engines to crawl or index as content. So make sure you carefully optimize the image size and rest of the page.
Product Page – People running an eCommerce website can create a good product page with keyword-rich content.

#5. Focus on External and Internal Linking

Internal links are nothing but hyperlinks on one page of your website that lead to a specific page on your site, whereas an external link is a hyperlink that leads to a credible page on another website. By internally linking your blogs, you can keep the visitors on your website engaged for longer, creating a great user experience, ultimately encouraging them to sign up. These links boost the authority of your pages and entire site by making them more accessible to readers. Internal links are frequently employed as a call-to-action. They can boost the visibility and search engine ranking of your website. The anchor text, or hyperlink text, should be a specific and descriptive term that will assist a search engine bot in "crawling" or understanding your website and its context. Internal links will also assist a bot in locating additional web pages on your site. Users and search engine bots will properly index a page, making it easier to navigate. This means that the page will be included in a search engine's collection of web pages, making it more convenient for people to find your website.

On the other hand, external or outbound links point to another related domain from your site. These links are one of the best SEO techniques one can apply to increase the trust and credibility of your site, which is vital for an SEO friendly blog. Such best SEO practices help the search engine understand your blog better and offer the best way to build relationships with a blogger from the same niche as yours. You can use Google Related Link Operator to figure out relevant links. Here are things you should consider when performing external linking:

Relevant Blogs Only – Try to link up with websites or blogs with the same niche as yours. Search engines keep track of external links and value only relevant ones. So, ensure you link with relevant, trusted and worthy sites only.
Limit External Linking – Instead of getting too many external links with fewer and relevant blogs. This takes care of a better reader experience and encourages visitors to return.
Avoid Link Farms – Following Google's Panda updates, it's better to avoid two-way backlinking. Google penalises domains linked with private blog networks and devalues their links.

#6. Improve Your Organic CTR Using PPC Testing

PPC works best for people looking for more traffic and visibility instantly. Click-through rate is among the easy SEO tips employed as a ranking component, and it's something you should work on improving. Title tags and meta descriptions prove to be two factors that can influence your site's CTR. At the very least, CTR is one aspect over which you have some control (bearing in mind that additional ad space, image blocks, and the like can all push down organic listings and result in a lower CTR). If you did this over a longer period, other variables could come into play by making adjustments and measuring the consequences. You can use PPC to test these title tags and meta descriptions if you don't want to wait too long for results.

Even if you're not running a business-like PPC campaign, setting up ads for a set of pages to test different titles and descriptions is worthwhile. Because of how ad headlines and descriptions are constructed, you won't get like-for-like title tags and meta descriptions with advertising. Still, you will get some useful data surrounding key terms and headings, for example. Ensure that your test is appropriately set up to discover the greatest influence on CTR. For example, to select the optimal title tag, test at least three different headlines while keeping the description the same for each.

#7. Add Social Media Elements

Although social media does not directly affect SEO rankings, the links you distribute across social media platforms help to boost brand awareness. In addition, adding social media elements helps by enhancing SEO through:

Widespread diffusion of content
Longer lifespan of your postings
Increased web exposure and traffic from natural sources
Improved brand's recognition
Improved brand's image
Enhanced local SEO

More people sharing your material on social media sends social signals that your postings are relevant to your target market. And this is why including social media on your pages proves to be highly beneficial. Search engines, like your potential customer, value social media. As a result, ensure to include social media elements/icons on your website pages related to your social media accounts. This will improve the company's search engine rating and lend credibility to the company.

Conclusion

Creating an SEO-friendly website is a smart choice to boost your company's visibility. If you plan to see your website's organic traffic growing in the future, you must go beyond the basics and dive deeper into SEO strategies that have the potential to propel your site and take it to new heights. Invest time to explore, identify chances your competitors are overlooking, develop a strategy, and watch your website grow. Then, see how the search engines react to these easy yet effective approaches on your website/blog. While there are various ways to score your SEO utilising the best SEO techniques, the essential principles above will get you started if followed correctly. What you need to understand is that while knowing about these easy SEO tips is important, putting them into action on your website is crucial.