There are many factors that go into the ranking of websites. Some aspects of SEO can be tantalizing, but for the basic points it really doesn’t have to be that complicated or difficult. Take a moment and get a crash course in SEO and how to best spend time making your site better.
Unless you are making a full time job of managing your website, majorly in depth SEO knowledge is probably an area left painstakingly decoded by the professionals. Search Engine Algorithms are highly secret but many times we can get vague insights into their complexity through information put out by those search engines. Updates happen frequently so don’t spend your entire budget in one single aspect, it may come back to hurt you.
Without further ado, here are 5 easy SEO tips that can help your website search ranking:
1. Don’t ever, and I mean EVER, take shortcuts. SEO is something meant to be helpful to the visitor searching for that special website or bit of information. Doing things that trick people into clicking, falsify your content, paying for massive influxes of links, and spamming are generally very harmful to your website. Sure, you might get away with the latest trend in black hat SEO for a couple months but it WILL come back to harm your rankings.
2. Content! A simple way to help your SEO is by writing relevant content, updating regularly, and being helpful with your endless pool of knowledge. Do be helpful. Help people solve problems, make educated purchases, stay trendy, entertain. Being engaging with your content is also helpful for gathering up a group of followers and starting a community.
3. Find out what’s working for you and improve upon it. Ten to twenty minutes spent here and there analyzing your websites traffic and search results can be worth months of guess work. If your website is ranking fantastic for your article on “Iconic Sneakers of The 90’s,” maybe some similar content writing will get the same results. If you can start dominating one single area of searches you might get the visits, links, and shares to help out other areas of your website.
The same thing goes for social media. Track time spent using different platforms, your interactions, likes, shares, and so on for one week. Figure out what social media channel is giving the greatest reward per your time spent. Give the winning social media platform a little more attention, and that doesn’t mean 100% of your time for social interaction.
4. Stick with it! Changes in SEO can take a long time to come to the surface. Don’t expect anything to really change your traffic patterns in a day or even weeks sometimes. It often times takes months to see the entire change come to light. Be very patient with your SEO efforts, go into this knowing things will take time and some efforts might not produce anything of benefit for the time being.
5. Keep good content structure on your pages. Instead of bolding titles in your content, use heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4). Write for people not search engines. Gone are the days of writing the keyword a million times on one page. Keep things easy to read and don’t be afraid to use synonyms of your keywords to break things up a bit. Include photos and video where you can. The web is ever changing and so are attention spans. Make your content visual.
Bonus SEO Tip:
If your website is not mobile friendly you should be working on that area. Mobile and tablet web traffic is a big deal. Make sure people can view your content from multiple types of devices. It will help with search engines also. My recommendation has always been well done responsive designs.
