Do you want to get more traffic to your website? Search engine optimization (SEO) can make it happen. Fine-tuning your website’s SEO can help it appear at the top of more organic search results, and it can help improve your site’s overall PageRank. And improving your site’s SEO isn’t as hard as you might think.
The most important thing you can do to improve your site’s search ranking is to create quality content that users will value. SEO keywords, metadata, and alt tags are important, too. Update your content regularly to stay on top of changes in the SEO space, and do what you can to create backlinks and referral traffic to your content.
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Create Quality Content
Google prioritizes quality of content over just about everything else when ranking pages. The number one thing you want to do to get more search traffic to your website is to create authoritative, high-quality content that users will want to consume.
Of course, your content should use the SEO keywords that you want to include on your page. Make sure to use long-tail keywords by including relevant words around your short-tail keywords. The content should be easy to read – it should feel natural. It shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords – you’ll get penalized for that. It should give the user a valuable and enjoyable experience. And it should go into depth about the topic – long-form content that’s 1,500 to 2,500 words long gets better search results. Ensure your content is up-to-date with latest industry practices, trends, and discoveries. It should be accurate, informative, and free of distracting elements like pop-ups or autoplay elements. Use images to illustrate your content and make sure it will load quickly on any device. Google is now prioritizing mobile-first design for webpages.
Use the Right Keywords
You can learn to use Google AdWords to find the right keywords for your website, but it may be easier in the long run to use an organic SEO agency to help you perform keyword research and handle back end SEO tasks, like URL structure, site architecture, and schema markup. You should identify a different target keyword for each page on your website. A single page can’t rank for more than one keyword unless the multiple keywords are similar to each other; for example, “nursing jobs” and “nursing careers” might work fine together on the same page, but “nursing jobs” and “how to plant a tree” will not.
Place keywords in your page URL, in your H1 title, and in your subheadings, but do so in a way that is user-friendly and reads naturally. Don’t stuff your keyword into every subheading if it doesn’t naturally fit, for example.
Update Your Content Regularly
Regularly updating your content shows Google that your page remains relevant, so updating your content regularly is important. Add up-to-date information to your content, remove broken links, and refresh your evergreen content’s SEO regularly to keep it performing well.
You can also add a blog to your website. As long as you update it regularly, a blog is a constant source of fresh content and a way to include more SEO keywords and metadata on your site. Use your blog to reach out to customers with the information they need about how to use your products and services, industry events, business events, and more.
Generate Backlinks and Referral Traffic
Backlinks and referral traffic show Google that your website is valuable to users. Backlinks, or links back to your site from other sites, can be hard to generate. Some strategies include guest posting on other blogs and including a link back to your website in the body of the post or in your author bio. Reach out to sites that could benefit from linking to your site. And, of course, continue publishing useful, valuable content that users will benefit from – when your content is authoritative and high-quality, it will naturally generate backlinks.
You can generate referral traffic using social media. Share your blog posts to your company’s social media websites and make them sharable so that customers can generate more referral traffic on your behalf. The more shares your content receives on social media, the higher it will rank in search results.
Use Carefully Crafted Metadata and Alt Tags
Metadata is information about your page’s contents that appears in the HTML code for your page. Metadata can be difficult to get right – you have to include a call to action, a clear benefit, and, of course, your SEO keyword. An SEO agency can generate title, keyword, and description metadata to optimize your page for search.
Alt tags are vital for people who use text-only search engines and browsers – they provide text descriptions of images and videos that appear on your site. Alt tags also help Google’s web crawlers crawl and index your site, so don’t leave them out.
Boosting your site’s ranking isn’t hard if you have some basic SEO skills. What you can’t do on your own, an SEO agency can help you with. Soon, you’ll be getting more traffic than you ever expected.
