Having a good SEO positioning and appearing in the first results of Google is the main objective of any company with a presence on the Internet. Web positioning can become a very heavy task if you take into account each of the 200 Google SEO factors, in addition to the constant updates to its algorithm that modify or expand this list. To make your life a little easier, we have created a ranking with 13 key SEO tricks to start positioning higher in the organic results of the main search engines.
1. Relevant and quality content.
The first of our SEO hacks has to do with content, of course. Dwell time is the amount of time visitors spend on your website and can affect SEO ranking. When you provide useful content, users tend to stay longer on your website to consume the information and thus, dwell time increases.
According to this research, content between 2000 – 2,500 words seems to be the ideal length of a post for SEO in search engines.
While word count isn’t the most dominant factor in SEO, no one will read your articles if they don’t find them useful. Longer content gives you the opportunity to provide more value, include more keywords, incorporate more external links, and of course, get people to spend more time reading to increase dwell time. Another reason to create useful content is that when users bookmark your content in Chrome, it will improve your website’s SEO ranking on Google.
Page loading speed is a factor in both Google’s and Bing’s algorithm for ranking websites. Users tend to abandon a website if they have to wait even a few seconds for the page to load. This negatively impacts your dwell time, increases your bounce rate, and reduces the number of page views, all of which hurt your website rankings.
There are many ways to increase page loading speed, some of which include using caching plugins, ensuring code is clean, optimizing image sizes, reducing the number of plugins, and minimizing redirects.
Optimizing your website’s images can help reduce file size and improve loading speed. Using high-quality images has been shown to increase conversion rates. Proper image optimization can help you leverage photos to build empathy, increase trust, and improve user experience without compromising loading time.
3. Image optimisation
Aside from image file format and size, there are other ways to ensure your images are doing a good SEO job. You can signal the relevance of your content to search engines by using keywords in the image file name, alt tag, title, or description.
4. Headings
No one likes to face a wall of text. Formatting your content well helps improve the user experience. It makes readers more willing to spend time reading the content and come back for more – an important sign of relevance in the eyes of search engines.
Proper use of header tags can help divide your content into sections that are easier to read. It is very easy to insert these tags in WordPress to improve the user experience and boost the SEO ranking of your content.
Search engines also value the use of keywords in header tags. By including relevant terms in your headers, you are also giving your rankings for those keywords a boost.
5. Outbound links
To make your content more useful and relevant, you can link to other authority sites so that your readers can get more detailed information. Not only will this increase the relevance of your content and the time readers spend on your site, but it is also believed to send trust signals to Google and improve SEO ranking.
However, too many outbound links can distract the user and make the content difficult to follow.
6. Multimedia elements
Images, videos, slideshows, and audio can all help enrich the user experience and allow you to deliver information in the most appropriate way for your target audience. They also act as a signal of quality content to search engines – after all, you’ve put time and effort into making your content engaging and interactive.
Video marketing has become an increasingly integral element in user engagement and conversion. Websites that use videos can achieve a 4.8% higher conversion rate, compared to an average of 2.9% on websites that don’t use videos. Videos are one of the most important SEO tricks, as they make visitors spend more time on a website and retain information better.
7. Broken links
Who wants to see a 404 page after clicking on a link? Broken links make for poor usability. Not only that, search engines will consider your website abandoned if there are a large number of broken links and will stop showing your website in the results.
Fortunately, you don’t have to go through every page of your website to test links manually. There are plenty of tools and apps that will help you ensure your site is free of broken links:
Even if you have an audience that is an expert in your field, they probably don’t want to have to rack their brains too much to read your content. Making it easy to read and understand makes it useful for your readers. Google also takes readability into account when ranking web pages.
You can use a variety of tools to check the readability of your content:
Using the right format and layout can help improve user experience and make your content easy to digest, so your readers will stay on your site longer to consume the information.
Formatting can help improve the usability of a web page by making content easy to read:
Use a font size and typeface that are easy to read.
Use bold and colors, sparingly and strategically, to draw attention to important information.
Write short paragraphs with wide line spacing.
Add bulleted or numbered lists for added clarity.
Divide content into sections with subheadings.
10. Contact page
Websites that have sufficient contact information gain trust and can therefore rank higher in search engines.
Include a contact page on your website and make the link visible to the user to make it easier for them to find it.
A well-designed contact form increases user engagement with a company’s online presence. It also helps generate new business opportunities, capture new leads, improve customer service, and much more.
11. Site architecture and navigation
When visitors can’t find what they need on a website right away, they’re more likely to leave. This contributes to higher bounce rates and lower page views.
A well-designed site architecture with clear navigation is critical to helping visitors find what they want, achieve their goals, and come back repeatedly (repeat visits improve SEO rankings).
A flat site architecture not only makes content easier to find, it helps Google’s bots crawl the entire web quickly.
For some time now, Google has begun penalizing sites without responsive design. More and more users are consuming content on their mobile devices, and not having an optimized design affects user experience and conversion.
13. Social Networks
The last of our SEO tricks has to do with how many shares on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media mentions influence your web positioning.
Installing social media buttons on your website makes it easier for users to share your content and therefore improves the user experience. It also helps drive purchasing behaviour. Nearly 4 in 10 Facebook users report that they have gone from liking, sharing or commenting on an item to purchasing it. The figure is similar across all social networks, with 43% of users having purchased a product after sharing it on any other social platform.
