SEO, or search engine optimization is on every online marketers’ mind. Everyone is dying to find the best SEO strategies to boost their ranking. If you don’t know what is SEO and why it matters, read this guide and you will understand.
Here are the top 11 SEO strategies that explode your ranking…
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1. Site Speed
If you visit a website that load more than 5 seconds, I believe you will leave it, same as your visitors, low site speed results in lower traffic, lower ranking, and it’s bad for SEO.
You can check your site speed with Google Page Insight or Pingdom Website Speed Test.
Here is how you can speed up your website:
2. AMP
AMP stands for accelerated mobile pages. AMP is an open-source library that allows mobile users to load your website nearly instantly. Basically, what it does is it speed up your mobile site speed by rendering JavaScript and CSS on your site, this will result in only important contents will be showed and better user experience.
Video Explained – What is AMP?
Like what I’ve said earlier, site speed is one of the biggest SEO determining factors. Nowadays everyone is browsing with their mobile devices, if you ignore the mobile traffic, you are leaving money on the table.
Detailed walkthrough how to set up AMP:
3. Rich Snippets
Rich snippets are the extra information showed between the URL and the description.
In this Hawaiian Pizza Recipe we can see a picture, rating, reviews, estimate cooking time and calories, these are all rich snippets.
People will be more likely to click the website that has rich snippets, and Google will rank it higher in search results.
4. Keywords
It comes as no surprise that keyword research is the key point of ranking. We need to target low hanging fruit keywords which have low competition and high traffic, by using the keyword research tool like Jaaxy, we can easily find the best keyword.
More details about keyword research:
But here I’m not talking about the importance of keyword research, I’m going to teach you where to place them for a better SEO.
Of course, your title should be the result of your keyword research, ideally your keywords should be also included in the first or the second paragraph of the post. You can scroll up to see how I include my keyword in the second paragraph.
Some people will stuff keywords throughout the post, this will lower the reader experience and lower the ranking. My suggestion is, write naturally and use keywords when relevant. I never think where to place my keywords, since my keywords are relevant to my post, they will naturally show up in my post several times.
Do you use images in your pages and posts? If yes, it’s a great place to put keywords.
This is how you do it:
1. First, go to Media Library and click your images. As you can see, by default, the Title is your file name and the Alt Text is blank.
2. Instead of using the default setting, place your keywords in it.
It’s a nice way to get extra SEO juice. But always make sure your keywords are relevant to your images, sometimes I prefer putting words that relevant to my images rather than my target keywords.
5. List Based Content
Let’s do a small experiment:
“Best Travel Sites”
“10 Best Travel Sites”
If both websites appear on the first page of Google, which one will you click?
Just like this post, not only adding the count to the title but also create a list based content. This is better for the reader experience and SEO.
It’s not necessary to make all your content a listed based content, but it works really well.
6. Internal Links
You may or may not know, Google loves links. I’m not talking about affiliate links, but internal and external links.
Internal links are the link that links to a page in your website. Internal links help Googlebot crawling your website and also keep visitors stay longer on the website.
Overall, internal links are very good for user experience and SEO.
Internal Links Heaven
Table of Contents and Anchor Text are the best way to put several relevant internal links in one post. Actually, I’ve put a table of contents at the top of this post.
Each link is searchable and has a chance to rank in Google, this is why I love table of contents and anchor text so much, so does Google.
Here is how you can add an “Internal links heaven” in your post:
7. External Links
External links are the link that links out to another website, many people think external links are bad for SEO because they will increase the bounce rate.
The fact is they are actually good for SEO, linking out to relevant and authoritative websites, like Google and Wikipedia can let Google think your website is helpful and valuable since you are offering relevant information to your visitors.
8. Embed YouTube Videos
There are two reasons why you should embed a YouTube video that relevant to the topic in your post, even that video is not yours.
First, people tend to watch a 15 minutes video rather than reading a 1000 words post. A video can help your readers consume the content, and it will increase the reader experience.
Second, when people watch a video, it increases the time people stay on your post, and staying time is another ranking factor.
And embed videos on your site won’t affect site speed, because those videos are on YouTube’s servers.
Why embed a video rather than put the link directly, because you can take full control of the video, here’s how:
1. Click the share button and choose “Embed”.
2. Here’s where you can take full control.
3. Copy the code and paste it to your post in Text mode.
9. Engagement
Having people commenting on your posts and reply back to these comments. Google will see your post as an engaging post, it will determine people love your post and ultimately rank you higher.
Having social sharing buttons on your site is mandatory, don’t underestimate the power of social sharing. It can be done with the plugin like AddToAny.
CTA, or call to action is the perfect way to ask people to share and comment on your post. A simple sentence like “Find this helpful? Share it with your friends” or “I would like to see your feedback in the comment section.” will help them to engage with the post.
10. Fetch as Google
Every time you finish a page or a post, you need to fetch as Google. What it does is it tells Google you just finished a new content, Google will then index it faster.
Normally it will take few days to get your content index in Google, but if you fetch as Google, it can be index within hours.
This is how you can fetch as Google:
Many people don’t know the SEO benefit of sharing content to Google+. Compare to other social media, there are relatively fewer people actively using Google+, but it can really help your ranking.
Why? The answer is really simple, Google owns Google+, it favors its own social network.
Unlike other social media, this is how you should post on Google+:
Conclusion
SEO is not the only and the most important ranking factor. None of the SEO strategies will work if your content has low quality, so before leverage these strategies, make sure you have quality content.
Now I’m asking for your engagement. lol
If you find this helpful, please share it and give me some feedback in the comment section.