According to experts in this field, the first step towards adopting good SEO practices is avoiding the bad mistakes one made in the past. Essentially, one needs to get rid of practices that are less effective and replace them with content-focused, calculated strategies that will drive organic traffic. In the current fast-changing world, SEO strategies evolve faster than many people seem to realize.
Ways to Improve SEO
The goal of an SEO expert is to make a site reach the top of the list. This will boost organic traffic and improve the overall return on investment. This is the dream for most people in this field. It is the same as in the school: you just want your anthropology paper to became best in the class or even in school. Some of the ways the experts improve their SEO include:
- Improved User Experience Across the Entire Site
Google, just like other search engines, wants to display the best results for users. They do not want users to keep coming across a ton of low quality and irrelevant results. If users were to come across lists of useless results after making queries on Google, they would stop using it altogether. Just like you, search engines want to attract as much user traffic as possible.
Google is the biggest search engine by far because they are very good when it comes to displaying the most relevant and helpful results. SEO experts think about this when they are optimizing sites. They understand that a website will rank well if it is of the highest quality. In addition, they know that a spammy site will take ages to load, which will lead to a huge bounce rate.
According to some experts, search engines reward websites with low bounce rates with better page rankings. To ensure great user experience, SEO experts do the following:
- They make their posts easy to read.
- They capture user interest by breaking down an idea into many sentences, using key phrases and words, and then ending with a colon to arouse interest; for example, ‘Here is the deal:'
- They write in an inverted pyramid style.
- They analyze and improve page designs continuously using tools such as Crazy Egg, Optimizely, Google Optimize, and more.
2. Optimize Sites for Voice Search
Much sooner than most people think, more than 50% of all searches will happen by voice. Essentially, instead of typing their queries on search engines, more people will use voice-activated devices to do their searches. Experts understand that this is something they need to include in their SEO strategy.
3. Instead of Focusing on Keywords Only, Experts Focus on Topic Clusters as Well
Just like algorithms, the search engine market is evolving as well. Today, Google's aim is to understand user intentions, such as what they are looking for, what they expect, and what results will be most helpful to them. Therefore, SEO experts always look at the context around their keywords to make allowances for different ways that users may phrase a search query.
4. Longer Content
According to experts in SEO, longer content usually leads to a higher ranking. Many people, however, do not want to write 3,000+ words for every article or blog post. In the same way, not everyone making a search query wants to read so much information. SEO experts tackle this problem by creating and repurposing what they already have
5. Taking Advantage of YouTube SEO
When it comes to the most popular Google searches, YouTube videos rank higher than any other type of video, which is something many people in the field of SEO forget to factor in. Experts, however, invest a considerable amount of time creating and optimizing videos for YouTube SEO and use the platform to increase their audience.
6. Building Backlinks
In the world of SEO, backlinks play a very important role, which is why experts build a variety of them. In terms of determining search rankings, backlinks are still the most effective tool. It is extremely difficult to rank well without them; however, they need to be high-quality backlinks earned through influencer marketing, outreach, and high-quality web content.
Certain tricks that could have given you a well-ranking search result a few months ago may hurt your site's ranking today. Some of the widely touted SEO hacks might even lead to a Google penalty that is difficult to recover from, which is why you need to stay up-to-date in SEO. Learn the different ways the experts improve their SEO and apply the lessons to your SEO endeavors.
Guest post courtesy of Jennifer Billington