Three most ignored tips that actually boost SEO ranking
One of the biggest worries of digital businesses, even long existing ones, is how their content make them rank in search engines. It’s a galactic matrix of stuff going on in the cyberspace and every business wants to stay competitive. This is one reason SEO skills will always be in demand.
There are tens of thousands of writers out there who claim to know SEO. It’s almost always a requirement to nab a good writing gig on one of those freelance economy platforms you signed up on. But then you get a couple of one-off writing jobs and that’s all. They never come back. No guesses here. The reason is because the content you write are not doing what they’re supposed to do. Could it be that your clients are not seeing their sites on the first pages of Google Search results?
So, you adorn your posts with keywords and links while you apply every single tip or trick you know. But you’re not just sure if they really work, because most times they seem not to. The truth is, SEO requirements are ever shifting, and you’re probably not always in the know. That is why your SEO’d content don’t rank high.
This post will walk you through a few guidelines on getting high ROI (if you’re an independent marketer) and/or having clients throw you money hands over fists. If you’re looking for a reason why there’s low traffic on your site or why your clients disappear faster than a fart in a fan factory, you’re on the right page. Here are 3 of the most ignored tips that can actually improve your SEO ranking.
Use relevant title tags
The title tag specifies the title of your webpage. It helps the search engine to identify what your site is about, and also creates a first impression for everyone that goes to your page. Titles do way more than improve your SEO ranking. Even if your page sits on top of search results, a title decides 90 percent of the time, if someone clicks on it or not. Here are guidelines to writing great title tags that will increase visibility and click-through rates.
- Avoid overstuffing your title tag with SEO keywords
- Avoid using more than 60 characters (including spaces)
- Do not use the same title tag for multiple pages
- Write your title tag in this format: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
Titles stuffed with keywords are bad, and titles not properly representing what your page is about are worse. If this happens, Google may choose to rewrite your titles. While this isn’t necessarily a catastrophe, what Google will offer cannot be perfect. It is best to use titles that align your keywords and search intent. To learn more about how to use title tags correctly, check out this post.
Paraphrase your keywords
Most times, clients have a colorful idea of what they want to stuff their sites with and they have a target audience—and keywords. And you the writer sticks to “all the rules” you know to optimize the content for good ranking. This page should show in search engine results the way Chris Brown’s “No Guidance” sat at number 2 on the Billboard for 30 weeks. Yet your page analytics that gets you more confused than confident. It is possible that you don’t understand the search intent of your target audience. To understand people’s search intent means to have an idea of what they’re looking for on your site.
Paraphrasing of long tail keywords that are related or similar to the original keyword phrase can do your page a lot of good. For example, if your audience’s search intent is “how to rank #1 in search engines,” it might narrow down your traffic course if you stick with that throughout the post. You should also include phrases like “how can I improve my SEO ranking or how do I optimize my content?” People say the same thing in different ways. You have to get resourceful with terms to increase the chances of your page sticking its head above competition.
Paraphrasing keywords and phrases basically functions like Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This post on SEO Book discusses a holistic approach to LSI, check it out.
Optimize your visual content
Pictures and images dramatically improve the visitor’s experience. Visual content is as important as (if not more than) webpage text but it doesn’t end there. Those websites that shuffle yours down the results pages, they optimize images religiously. Producing optimized images can do wonders to your ranking. Here are simple ways to optimize an image for SEO.
- Compress your images to reduce hugeness
- Always adhere to the appropriate size or file format
- Insert keywords while naming an image, or in its caption or description
Not paying attention to the size and format of your images can really hurt your SEO ranking. Your site may take longer periods to load if they are large, and not having them arranged properly will make things worse. These two common mistakes can bounce visitors from your site faster than a golf ball off a concrete floor. But if you follow these simple steps on image optimization, it might astound you the amount of traffic your images will generate for your online business. There are online resources that offer comprehensive lessons on how to improve SEO ranking with images.
Conclusion
Experts will recommend a myriad of things to do to improve your SEO ranking, but traffic demands are ever evolving. What always certainly work, are these 3 most ignored tips that actually boost SEO ranking. They never go out of style.
