Making your website relevant to search engines like Google so they can rank it higher on web searches is not always easy.
Learning SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to improve your site can be confusing sometimes. But not because they are confusing means you can’t do some of them.
Having a SEO-optimized website will make search engines think that your website is a better result than others, increasing the number of visitors to your site.
Search algorithms are always changing but there are a few things that will always work to improve your site’s value and rank.
With that in mind, we wanted to share with you this top 5 list with easy SEO optimization strategies that you can implement to boost your ranking for your targeted keywords.
1. Use Very Specific Keywords
Keywords are the words that we want search engines to relate to our site.
When someone searches for something online, like “chocolate cake”, there are going to appear many results that are considered relevant by the search engine.
But, if the search is too broad, then millions of other sites will be competing for it as well, making your chances to be seen very low.
The best advice is to target long-tail keywords. This will make your website reach fewer people but that will be more likely to enter your site as it’ll be more relevant to them.
Changing the keyword from “chocolate cake” to “Easy chocolate cake recipe”, fewer sites will be competing for it and your site will rank higher in the search results.
2. Mobile Friendly
People don’t often consider this much but the majority of web traffic today is generated by mobile devices.
That’s why making your website mobile friendly and more responsive to other devices makes a huge difference for search engines like Google.
Making your website mobile-friendly means that your site will be optimized for smartphones and tablets, and will change automatically to adapt and improve the user experience.
This is important because a large sum of online searches are made from those devices, so search engines will give priority to those sites that have a responsive design.
If your website is not mobile-friendly that also could decrease your user experience, lowering not only your rank in the SERPs but also your website’s relevancy.
Google has a tool to test how mobile-friendly is your website, called the Mobile-Friendly Test.
3. Optimize Images
When you are doing SEO optimization on your website you have to pay attention not only to the words you use but also you have to make sure your images are SEO optimized as well.
Images have tags that can help search engines understand what the content of the page is about and if it’s relevant or not (they can’t see the image but they can “read” it).
Also, something important to do when doing SEO optimization to your images is to compress them to a proper size.
Large files and images can slow down the page’s load time, making a poor user experience (affecting the dwell time and the bounce rate), and decreasing your site’s rank.
4. Title Tag and Meta Description
Making the title tags and meta descriptions SEO optimized helps a lot when trying to get more traffic to your website.
The title tag is useful to get search engines to understand what your page is about, and also to draw users to your site by picking their interest.
If your page receives traffic that means it’s valuable, which will make search engines rank it higher on the SERPs, and the higher it ranks the more traffic you get.
In another case, meta descriptions are different. Searchers don’t use meta descriptions to rank a website, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have value.
They’re opportunities to make users click on your site by giving a summary of what the page is about.
5. External and Internal Links
External links help search engines figure out what your site is about. Making external links to authority sites of high-quality information will show searchers that your site also has valuable information, ranking your site higher on the SERPs.
And, there are also Internal links. They are a great way to improve the authority of your own website’s pages, just by linking the pages with low traffic to those that do have it.
Now, this is the end of the list of the 5 easy SEO optimization hacks you can make to rank higher in the SERPs. It’s your turn to use them as a guide to improve your website’s SEO optimization and make a huge difference with just a few changes.