While new marketing techniques keep emerging, old good SEO still remains the most successful way to boost your search engine traffic. Throughout its history, SEO has seen lots of various tactics and scenarios, but only some of them have shown themselves as truly effective and widely used today by skilled marketers. Yet, SEO has also seen lots of dreadful mistakes. Let’s see what ten SEO tactics have been proven to bring outstanding results.
1) Proper use of keywords
A huge amount of SEO practices is centered around content, where keywords play a major role. Prior to writing, research the keywords and find out the most appropriate density. Use them naturally in the text and follow the conversational tone in your writing. Do not strive for perfect optimization of every piece you publish. Instead, publish as much content as possible and include keywords only where they are relevant. It is going to bring you long-tail search traffic that tends to bring better results and higher conversion rates.
2) On-site optimization
Meta titles and meta descriptions tend to attract visitors from search-result pages. Make sure they are relevant to the website topic and included on every page of your website. Keep your meta titles and descriptions short enough but not too long. 70 characters for the title and 160 characters for the description is going to be fine. Otherwise, you can harm your website rankings. In addition to meta titles and descriptions, you should also optimize H1 tags, external and internal links, ads, images, bullet points, content length, and text formatting.
3) Earn links
Inbound links have an impact on the rankings of your website and which is why you should take care of their quality and quantity. Even though you may be tempted to buy links on other websites, do not ever do it. It is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and even if those links could bring you some results in the beginning, you will sooner or later see the harm they cause. Search engines have now become very attentive to any unnatural links. You’d better get and use your links naturally, even if their quantity is going to be smaller. Use social sharing buttons and share your content in social media for higher exposure.
4) Tune your site’s loading speed
Loading speed tends to affect not only the general impression about your website, but also your search engine rankings. Nearly 40 percent of users leave the website if its loading time exceeds 3 seconds. Use the Pingdom tool to check your loading speed. It will analyse each element separately and tell you where optimization is required. Optimize your code, make it clean, use special plug-ins, and compress the images that make your website slow-loading. In addition, switching to a virtual private network (VPN) can highly reduce the loading speed.
5) Be unique
Publish only original content on your website. When Google sees that the same content is published on different URL’s, it tends to reduce your search engine rankings. Even if you publish your own text on different URL’s, it is still not very much favorable for your search engine rankings. You can check your website for any duplicate content with the help of such tools as CopyScape. Take all the necessary steps to find and delete non-original content.
6) Use multimedia
Videos, audio files, images, and slideshows will not only help you get your visitors entertained, but also make you look attractive for search engines. For them, multimedia serves as a sign of quality and well-delivered content, because a lot of work is put in it. Videos are becoming more and more popular today. They streamline user engagement and boost the conversion rates. Visitors spend more time on the website and thus increase your search engine rankings.
7) Website navigation matters
Users like intuitive navigation and so do search engines. When visitors can’t immediately find what they are looking for, they leave the website and search somewhere else. The average time visitors spend on your website is tracked and then generates high bounce rate. A well-planned website architecture is essential to help visitors understand how to find what they need at that moment. Most probably they will come back again – and don’t forget that repeated visits boost search engine rankings too. Make sure your website doesn’t have any broken links. They will only reduce your website usability.
8) Optimize website for mobile devices
Starting with 2015, Google has been reducing search engine rankings of those websites that are not mobile optimized. The increasing number of users prefer browsing through the websites on mobile devices. Search engines tend to reward websites that make it easier for users to do so. Test your website on a number of mobile devices with the most popular screen resolutions and make sure visitors can get faultless user experience, whatever device they use.
9) Google likes useful and long content
Dwell time is the term that designates the time users spend on your website. When your content is informative, they stay longer and your dwell time is increased. It is recommended that the average content length should range between 2000 to 2500 words. But what matters even more is the value it delivers. Long content does not always mean higher value, better keyword population, and more time users spend reading it. In addition, if readers bookmark your article in Chrome, your Google rankings will increase too.
10) Contact Us information
If the website has enough contact information, Google will consider it to be more trustworthy. Add a ‘contact us’ button to your navigation menu and make sure it can be found effortlessly. You will earn good reputation both from your visitors and from search engines. In addition, a contact form tends to make a good impact on your search engine rankings and general user experience.
Conclusion
SEO has always been one of the most difficult parts of online marketing. But now, when the best practices are revealed and the mistakes are acknowledged, it has good chances to earn you good rankings and bring you higher conversion rates. Is there anything more you would like to include into the above list? Please share in the comments.