If you own and operate a website, one of the top things on your list is how to rank high on search engines. If you’re relying on people to find you through a Google search, search engine optimization (SEO) needs to be at the top of your priority list. You won’t be able to generate leads for your business if nobody can find you.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about helping search engines, such as Google and Bing, to:

• find the information you publish on your website (web content)
• rank your website against similar websites.

Search engines try to find the most relevant web content to match a user’s search term. You can help your site to rank better against search terms by understanding how:

• customers search for your products and services
• search engines decide which content is more relevant.

Taking these steps can help to improve your website’s SEO and ultimately help to boost your search engine rankings.

• How Can you Improve Your Search Engine Rankings?
• What are the 10 Different Strategies for Boosting Search Engine Performance?
• How do I Improve my SEO Rankings in 2024?
• How do I Get Google to Rank Higher?
• What is the #1 Factor in Improving Your Search Rankings?
• What are the Three Stages of Ranking SEO?
• How can I Improve my Google SEO for Free?
• 6 Free SEO Tools to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings
• What is the Fastest Way to Rank a Keyword?

How Can you Improve Your Search Engine Rankings?

1. Understand your online customers

Like traditional marketing, improving your website SEO starts with understanding how your customers behave. For example, consider how a person might begin searching for a product or service.

• Awareness: the customer is aware of a problem that needs fixing, and begins searching for potential solutions using broad search terms. For example, ’ leaking tap’.
• Consideration: the customer understands their problem and is now searching for solutions that best meet their needs. They might start using search keywords that include a location, product feature or product type. For example, ’ plumber in Townsville’.
• Purchase: the customer is ready to buy, and generally knows who they will buy from. They will often search directly for the service provider. For example, ’ABC Plumbing’.

Understanding your customers’ search behavior will help you have an idea of which keywords to target on your web content.

2. Use keywords on your website

Keywords are the words or phrases a customer uses when they do a search. For example, ‘flowers online’ and ‘where do I buy flowers online’ are both considered to be keywords.

Read Also: How to Get High Visitor Retention Rate

Matching the keywords used on your website with the words used by customers when they search for you is an important part of SEO. Add popular keywords or phrases to your website. Use these words in your page titles, page content or even as the name of the image files on your page.

Use keywords that are relevant to your business, services or location. You can use any terms that a customer would search for as a keyword or phrase.

Tip: Be careful not to overuse keywords. This can have a negative impact on your SEO efforts. Make sure your content still reads naturally.

3. Refresh your page content often

Refreshing your website content regularly encourages search engines to visit your website more often. The more frequently they visit, the faster they’re able to discover new content on your website. You may also see some ranking benefits.

Examples of new content you can add include:

• information on new products or services you’re selling
• customer success stories
• videos or stories about your products or services
• news related to your business, products or services.

It’s also important to review your existing web content pages at least every 6 months and remove content that is no longer relevant.

4. Gain referrals from other websites

When ranking your web pages, search engines look at which other websites link to or cite your page and your website as a whole. To search engines, referrals from external websites are a vote of confidence in the accuracy, relevance and usefulness of your content.

However, not all referrals are weighted evenly. Referrals from highly reputable websites have more weight than less reputable sites. The more referrals you have from reputable websites, the better your website will rank.

5. Use meta tags in your content

Meta tags are pieces of content in your website coding that don’t display on your web page. These tags tell search engines and browsers extra information on what your page and content is about. Examples of meta tags include:

• Meta description – a description of what your page is about
• title – your page title which is displayed in the browser tab
• alternative text – tagged on media such as images as a text alternative of the media.

Search engines will sometimes also use your meta description in the search results they display.

6. Stay up to date on the latest SEO techniques

Search engines can change how they use web content (including meta tags) to rank websites and generate search results. To keep your site ranking well, make sure you:

• stay up-to-date on what search engines are placing importance on when ranking web pages
• lookout for new keywords that are relevant to your products and services
• stay-up-to date on new search behaviours and technologies (such as use of voice search or image search).

What are the 10 Different Strategies for Boosting Search Engine Performance?

You have a beautifully designed website with great content to share, but are people finding you and visiting the site? Even with the rise of social media, organic search is still a crucial website traffic driver, and it’s not going away anytime soon. That’s why it’s important to improve your search engine ranking so people can find you more easily than your competitors.

Below are 10 strategies you can implement now to help you boost your search engine performance.

1. Keyword research

Use search data and research your competition to find the best targets for each page on your website. Depending on how big your website is and the resources you have available, start with the pages that have the most content, and are helpful for your customers. Some examples would be your top one or two product/service pages or a well-written blog post that provides detailed information your customers are looking for.

Strategically select which phrases you want your pages to rank well for

The pages you choose should have a clear message that is focused on one topic. Here is where you research what phrase your customers are using to search for this topic. There are many tools you can use to find out how people search (Google keyword research tool and you’ll find ads or lists of free and paid tools).

This step could have a separate blog post dedicated to finding the right search phrase, but if we had to pick the most important piece of advice it is to choose a phrase that is specific and relevant. If it is specific, it will be several words long, and if it is relevant, it will appear multiple times throughout the page. Remember, don’t use the insider terminology you use, focus on what your everyday customer may search.

2. Write informative copy that people seek

You know your industry better than anyone. Write content that is helpful and also includes keywords and synonyms that get your website found by Google and other search engines. Include the keywords throughout the page to improve your search engine ranking, but don’t go overboard with keyword stuffing. Make sure it’s still readable for your visitors.

3. Title your page to help search engines and users

Search engines read the title tag, or meta title, as an important indicator of what the page is about. Your title tag is also the blue link everyone sees on a search engine results page, so be sure to include the keywords users search for.

This title is different from the bold heading everyone sees on your webpage, which is typically the heading tag described in the next step. Therefore, if it helps get more clicks, you can write one title for the search engine results page (SERP) and a different heading for your webpage.

4. Build pages with HTML header tags

The first heading, or H1 tag, is the most important heading on the page. The H1 tag is typically the first thing a visitor reads on your webpage. Header tags are commonly used for styling but should instead be used for content organization. Making use of subheadings is one of the best ways to improve search engine ranking.

For search engines, heading tags have more weight than regular copy and make skimming the page easy on a user. If you’re having trouble editing your heading tags, you’ll likely need a developer to update the page.

5. Give your URLs a purpose

The page URL is often ignored, so don’t let that be the case with you! The URLs should also benefit from keyword research. If you use a CMS like WordPress, the name of the page will appear in the URL. Before you launch the page, review what you named it and check the URL. You can update it to include the keywords you found in step 2. If you’ve already published the page, be sure to redirect visitors from your old page to the new page.

6. Internally link to other pages

As you’re writing copy for the page, you’ll often find yourself referencing other topics that you’ve already published. Internal linking is selecting a phrase and adding a hyperlink to the blog post or page you are referencing.

These links will get some users to click through and read your other pages, but more importantly, search engines will crawl these links too. The keywords you hyperlink are called anchor text. This gives the user and search engines context about the page you link to so it is important to use meaningful keywords in the hyperlink.

Tip: It may be easier to read your copy after the writing is complete and actively look for opportunities to link to other pages. This is especially important if you know you have new content that you want people to read. It is best to develop an internal linking strategy that groups and cross-references all of the great content on your site. This can be challenging but rewarding for your search engine rankings.

7. Use ALT tags with all your images

Images visually support the message on the page. Users love them, and search engines do too. That’s why you should always use descriptive (keyword-rich) ALT tags for all your images. Alt tags also keep your site accessible, which could help you avoid an ADA lawsuit.

8. Mobile-friendly design and page speed

It’s no secret that more and more users are coming to your site from mobile devices. Make sure your website design is mobile-friendly. Also, optimize the images, code, and content to load each page quickly. Visitors will leave slow websites and search engines will notice.

This is why having a fast website will improve your search engine ranking. You need great content, but website design and development are important when asking how to make your website rank.

9. Limit any duplicate content

Search engines like new and unique content. Find any duplicate content and make it substantially different or remove it altogether. There’s no advantage to saying the same thing over and over, and Google will penalize you for it. There are two likely scenarios where you’ll have duplicate content.

1. You’ve created a lot of content over the years and forget that you, or someone else, already wrote a page or blog post about the same topic. This probably isn’t a complete duplicate, but if the content significantly overlaps, then you are better off combining it into one strong page.
2. You don’t even realize it but your website has multiple versions of the same page. This could be from someone accidentally copying a page or you’ve created multiple versions for different languages or tracking purposes. You can let search engines know that you intentionally duplicated a page using a canonical URL. The Yoast plugin on WordPress easily lets you assign canonical URLs to pages if you need them.

10. Create an XML Sitemap and monitor crawl errors

• Submit Sitemap

Submitting a sitemap will help get pages indexed by search engines faster. If you’ve verified Google Search Console for your site in the first step, then you can submit your sitemap with Google. Bing also has a webmaster tools dashboard where you can submit a sitemap.

• Crawl Errors and Warnings

Search engines also crawl websites through links on pages. Be sure to monitor any errors or broken links and fix them or create redirects to ensure your site has the best chance to rank well. There are free broken link checkers you’ll find on Google.

How do I Improve my SEO Rankings in 2024?

To stay ahead of your competition, you need to improve and adapt your website’s SEO campaign every year. Here are five ways you can improve your search engine optimization strategy and rankings for 2024:

1. Improve SEO by Optimizing Existing Content

Before you dive into creating new content, take the time to audit and optimize your existing content. This process will allow you to remove irrelevant content that can be detrimental to SEO, maximize the potential of your existing content and avoid redundancies that can confuse the algorithm and site visitors.

Start by evaluating your published content and identify any pieces that haven’t been updated in more than a year. Review the pages to see whether any of the information presented is outdated and could use a refresh. You can also look for high-potential pages that are already getting some traction but could benefit from an even bigger rankings boost with further optimization.

2. Structure Content for Featured Snippets

Pulled from high-ranking web pages, featured snippets are essentially instant results that appear prominently at the top of a Google search results page in response to a user query. They make it easier for users to find the information they’re looking for directly on the results page and can drive traffic to the pages from which the info has been pulled.

To increase your content’s chances of appearing in a featured snippet:

• Target question-based queries, which often contain a featured snippet.
• Organize content with the appropriate HTML tags.
• Start your content with the most important information at the top before going into detail.

3. Consider Mobile Users

Starting in September 2020, Google began using mobile-first indexing, which means its algorithms prioritize indexing the mobile version of a website’s content over the desktop. If your website isn’t optimized for an ideal mobile experience, it won’t perform as well in Google search rankings. 

Read Also: What Does SEO Stand For in Advertising?

Use Google Search Console to identify issues with your mobile experience, and follow Google’s best practices for mobile-first indexing as you optimize your web experience for mobile users.

4. Take Advantage of Core Web Vitals

Speaking of Google Search Console, Google recently introduced Core Web Vitals to the platform to measure the quality of a website and help provide a better user experience. The Core Web Vitals guidelines measure the speed, interactivity and visual stability of a webpage. Improving these three metrics can help your website rank higher and improve your site’s UX.

You can find your site’s Core Web Vitals data under “enhancements” in your Google Search Console.

5. Use AI in the Right Ways

Although generative AI platforms can be powerful tools for content creation, ideation and optimization, it’s important to know the right ways to use these tools so they don’t hamper your SEO efforts. Google can and will detect AI-generated content as it crawls your web pages since AI is limited and has some ”tells” that alert the algorithm when something was written using the technology.

Because AI still can’t replicate the content produced by skilled human writers, it is often lower in quality and therefore can be penalized by Google. Simply using a generative AI platform to spit out a piece of content and publishing it on your website may be expedient, but it won’t be exceptional. Instead, AI will likely give you a low-quality, regurgitated piece that won’t break through the internet noise and be rewarded by Google.

However, AI tools can actually be effective in increasing the quality of your content when used correctly. Play around with AI content platforms like ChatGPT, Midjourney or Jasper for brainstorming, writing outlines and briefs, identifying commonly asked questions and most-searched keywords, conducting research, planning editorial calendars and optimizing existing content.

How do I Get Google to Rank Higher?

A strong Google ranking is still one of the best methods to increase traffic to your website, despite the fact that the landscape of digital marketing has changed dramatically and new platforms are becoming more and more popular. Online statistics indicate that over 67% of clicks originate from the top five organic results on the first page!

In the end, you have a greater chance of gaining new clients if more people visit your website. Additionally, you have the ability to take some of your rivals’ prospective clients away if you score higher than them.

1. Focus on on-page SEO

In 2024, on-page optimization remains one of the easiest ways to boost your rankings on Google. Not only doesn’t it take a lot of time to do, but you’ll also see results quickly. In short, it refers to all the elements that appear on the pages of your website that you can optimize like headlines, page titles, and images. On the other hand, off-page SEO (which is just as important) has to do with creating relevance for search engines by, for example, getting more backlinks (a key topic that we’ll focus on in more detail later in this article). 

Here are some best practices to help you with on-site SEO:

• Use your keywords at the beginning of your title tags
• Focus on creating long-form content (aim for at least 1,800 words)
• Insert your keyword two to three times per page (keyword stuffing will get you the opposite result)

2. Don’t neglect technical SEO

In short, technical SEO refers to making sure that your website is designed in such a way that search engines will be able to crawl and index it easily. Content is still king, but if the search engines can’t find, crawl, and index your pages, all your efforts will be in vain. 

For example, you’ll need to make sure that:

• All your pages are secure
• Your site is optimized for mobile
• You don’t have any plagiarized content or similar content on different pages of your own site
• Pages load quickly
• All the links work

3. Create internal links

While we’ve written a lot about the importance of backlinks, you should also focus on creating internal links. An internal link is a hyperlink that links to another page on the same domain. In short, they help Google with finding and indexing your web pages. 

One of the advantages of using internal links is that the anchor text may match the content exactly. So, they’re pretty straightforward to create and you don’t have to rely on other third-party websites. Ideally, you should place the internal links toward the beginning of the web page. This can also help to improve your bounce rate (and by improve we mean lower, but more about this later). 

4. Match search intent

Do you know what your target audience actually wants to know about the topics that you plan to write about? You might think that they already know all the basics about a topic like influencer marketing and want to know all the in-depth details or vice versa. 

Basically, Google rewards the websites that share content that people are searching for most often. What does your target audience typically enter into Google’s search bar? Do they turn to the internet for how-to guides, real-life examples or tips for beginners? 

One way to make sure that your content matches search intent is to look at the content that ranks on the first page. Do your articles cover that content? If not, see it as an opportunity to repurpose some of your older content so that it’s more in line with what your target audience is currently searching for online. 

5. Improve your bounce rate

If visitors land on your site, look at one of your pages and return back to the search page in a matter of seconds, it will hurt your search rankings. To Google, this is an indication that users aren’t impressed with your website. In other words, a lower bounce rate shows that users actually enjoy browsing your site. 

Not only is a low bounce rate better for search ranking, but it will also mean that visitors have more time to get better acquainted with your brand which can help to increase sales and customer loyalty. After all, isn’t this your real goal at the end of the day?

To improve your bounce rate, make sure that all the most important info appears above the fold (in other words, visitors shouldn’t have to scroll down to find the information that they need). Adding a table of contents (or a summary like we do) can also help visitors to go directly to the section that’s relevant to their query. And, to make your content easier to digest, it’s key that you add visual elements like infographics and videos, which brings us to our next SEO strategy. 

6. Boost your click-through rate

While rankings are important, you should also keep an eye on organic traffic. After all, what’s the use that your target audience stumbled upon your site via an online search, but didn’t actually visit your website? This is why monitoring your click-through rate is crucial. 

To improve your click-through rate, focus on your metadata like the URL and the metadata description that appears below the search result. It might sound insignificant, but if this info looks relevant and credible, your click-through rate will benefit which in return will boost your ranking too. 

All things considered, shorter, yet descriptive URLs, work better. With regards to your title tags, don’t be scared to appeal to your readers’ emotions. This is one of your few chances that you get to convince users to click on your link. 

7. Don’t be afraid to hire experts

While there are more technical elements like mobile optimization and web page speed that you’ll be more inclined to leave to the professionals, it doesn’t mean that everything else you should do on your own. Whether you need a freelance content writer or a UX designer, if there’s any other aspect that you feel you need help with, hire the help of the professionals. We’re talking about your online presence here. That’s a lot that’s at stake. 

What is the #1 Factor in Improving Your Search Rankings?

It should be obvious by now that improving the SEO rankings of your marketing pages is necessary if you want to see an increase in site traffic. However, how are you able to accomplish that? What even are the contributing components to Google rankings?

Six Google ranking elements that can help you raise your SEO ranks are examined below:

1. Keywords

The first and most obvious of the major Google ranking factors are keywords. Keywords are what people type right into the Google search bar, telling Google exactly what they want to see in the results, so it’s no surprise that they’re a critical ranking factor. If you want one of your pages to rank for a particular keyword, one of the best ways to achieve that is to include the keyword throughout your page.

Don’t stuff it into every sentence, but have it here and there in the content, so Google will make the connection. Specifically, try to include your primary keyword in your title tag and meta description. It will not only give you a boost in rankings but will also better serve to attract clicks!

2. User search intent

As important as keywords are, they’re not everything. For a page to rank in Google, it needs to match user search intent — that is, the reason users search for a given keyword. You might target the keyword “how to get rid of roaches” on your page, but if the whole page is nothing but an ad for your pest control services, it won’t address what users are looking for when they search for that keyword.

Google will pick up on that and rank you lower. To keep your rankings high, make sure your page provides the information users are looking for when searching with your targeted keywords.

3. Internal links

Google responds positively to pages that generate a lot of traffic. When users seem to be flocking to a particular page, that tells Google that the page is valuable. Pages can also benefit from keeping users there for a long time.

These benefits make internal linking another of the top ranking factors. When you use your content to link to other pages on your site, you give users an avenue to explore new information when they finish reading a page. As users jump from one page to the next, they stay on your site longer.

They also drive traffic for pages other than the one they initially visited, boosting those pages’ rankings in Google. This helps contribute to link equity across your site — that is, spreading the ranking power around.

4. Backlinks

Another way to improve SEO rankings is to earn backlinks for your content. Backlinks are links on third-party sites that lead to your pages. Ideally, all your content should have a few high-quality backlinks.

It’s important to aim for quality over quantity. Rather than scrambling to earn as many backlinks as possible, focus on obtaining a few backlinks from the most authoritative sites in your industry. When reputable sites link to you, Google views you as reputable too.

You can earn backlinks by finding broken links on third-party websites and contacting them to recommend that they replace them with new links to your content. Make sure you approach this with a friendly and helpful attitude — this is meant to benefit them as much as it is you!

5. Responsive design

When you design your web content, you probably do it on a computer. But not all your traffic will happen on desktop — in fact, over 50% of all Internet traffic comes from mobile devices. That’s why you need to make sure all your pages practice responsive design.

Responsive design is the practice of optimizing pages for multiple device formats. By creating a mobile-friendly site, you can reach a wider audience. Furthermore, Google ranks sites based on mobile format — so without a mobile-friendly design, you won’t rank well to begin with!

6. Page speed

Page speed is yet another major contributor to your Google rankings. Most users expect pages to load within two seconds, and if your page takes too long, they won’t stick around. There are a few things you can do to help your pages load faster, including:

• Caching web pages
• Limiting redirects
• Compressing images
• Minifying code

When your pages load more quickly, you’ll reduce your bounce rates. Then not only will you keep your existing traffic, but you’ll receive more traffic as well. Google will then rank you higher based on the improved user experience it observes.

What are the Three Stages of Ranking SEO?

One of the key components of managing a website is your position in Google search engine results. For many, it is, in fact, the most significant. This is particularly valid for companies, particularly those engaged in e-commerce, who typically aim to reach a large audience.

Search engine ranking is divided into three phases. You should prioritize building as much authority in that sector as you can, make sure the information on your website is of the highest caliber and closely related to the intended subject matter, and make sure you can be found at all.

Fortunately, so much of what goes into simply improving the quality of your website ultimately enhances its standing with search engines, but do also take into account the big picture.

1. Crawling: The Discovery Stage

In many cases, you do not need to do anything in order to get your website discovered, as Google and other search engines do much of this type of work automatically. This is done through crawling, which notes the contents of the web pages that have been discovered. However, that is not where analysis takes place. The crawlers forward this information to where that is done.

As far as the crawling stage goes, you should ensure that it is being done while also noting that, in many cases, only a portion of your website is being crawled while the rest is not. Additionally, the speed at which your website is being crawled is an important consideration, especially if you are posting time-sensitive content that you want to be quickly discovered by search engines.

Regularly updating your website will usually increase that speed as well as how often it is crawled. To see which parts have been indexed by a search engine, head there and type “site:” immediately followed by your domain name with no spaces between “site:” and it.

One of the most significant ways that you can help crawlers out is by having an easily navigable website. For example, are links to your important web pages posted on your homepage? Keep in mind that any that require logging in or the completion of a similar step to access will not be crawled.

Conversely, you may want some of your web pages to not be discoverable. Blocking crawling is possible as well.

2. Indexing: The Analysis Stage

Indexing plays a crucial role in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as it directly impacts how search engines interpret and affect ranking factors in your website’s piece of content. In essence, indexing is the process of deciphering the information presented on your website to determine its relevance to searchers or users’ search queries.

For effective indexing, it’s imperative to ensure that your website hosts high-quality content aligned with at least SEO basics, keywords, and topics you aim to rank for. For instance, if your website specializes in selling bags, your content should revolve around running-related subjects such as types of bags, luxury bags, eco-friendly bags, and the latest bags. However, topics unrelated to your niche, like woodworking or microbiology, should be avoided to maintain relevance.

The frequency of indexing is influenced by various factors, including the frequency of updates and the volume of traffic your website receives. News websites with a global reach, for example, are indexed more frequently than newer websites focusing on niche subjects such as Georgia’s peaches.

To exert more control over indexing, webmasters can utilize techniques such as adding noindex meta tags to specific pages and signaling search engine bots to exclude those pages from their indexing process.

So, in SEO marketing strategy, indexing ties closely with metrics such as organic traffic, which refers to visitors who find your website through unpaid, organic search results. By ensuring effective indexing, you can enhance your website’s visibility and attract more organic traffic, ultimately boosting its performance in search engine rankings.

Moreover, indexing intersects with other SEO strategies such as keyword research, link building, citations, title tags, and optimizing meta descriptions. Implementing relevant keywords strategically throughout your content can improve your website’s indexing and ranking for those terms. Similarly, building quality backlinks from reputable sources and crafting compelling meta descriptions can enhance your website’s visibility and click-through rate (CTR) in search results.

Furthermore, indexing is pivotal for maximizing the functionality of your website, ensuring that it delivers the most relevant and valuable content to users. By focusing on indexing and providing relevant content, you can enhance user experience, increase engagement, and drive conversions.

In summary, indexing serves as a critical stage in the SEO process, influencing various metrics, including organic search traffic, social media visibility, and ultimately, conversions. By prioritizing relevant content, optimizing for indexing, and employing effective SEO strategies, you can improve your website’s visibility and performance in organic search results.

3. Ranking: The Ordering Stage

A significant focus for many is the third stage: ranking. That is when a search engine decides where to place your website in its search engine results pages.

If you are fortunate enough to have yours at or near the top of its SERPs, the number of click-throughs that you receive will be significant compared to your competition. This does not only result from increased visibility, but through more eyes seeing your website on the SERPs. It is also related to credibility as, for example, surfers tend to view websites that Google ranks highly as more reputable than others.

To determine where to rank webpages, search engines use regularly updated algorithms that take into account several factors.

One of the most important ones is backlinks, which are links to your website from somewhere else. For example, if Vogue’s website has a link to your fashion website, that will give you a significant boost. Well-placed internal links can also communicate the quality of your website to a search engine.

That said, improving the quality of the visit for an average person who is interested in your content should be your primary focus, as that is also why search engines’ algorithms change so much. They intend to best direct people to the websites that will give them the experiences that they want.

You should also focus on the quality of the user experience as that relates to things like page speed and security – i.e. do you have an HTTPS website? An increasingly important additional factor is how mobile-friendly your website is.

One method that search engines use for measuring overall quality is through how much time a visitor spends on one of your web pages or on your website as a whole. A particularly negative indicator occurs when they immediately leave your website to choose a different one that the SERPs had shown.

How can I Improve my Google SEO for Free?

The basic goal of SEO is to raise a website’s position in naturally occurring search engine results. Put another way, the stronger your SEO, the more probable it is that customers will find your business through Google searches.

Even though you have access to sophisticated SEO techniques, there are numerous free or nearly free ways to optimize your website right now and raise its search engine ranking. In this section, we’ll go over several tactics you can use in the on-site, off-site, and technical areas of search engine optimization.

With about 3.5 billion Google searches a day, SEO is an incredibly valuable and important tool to connect to potential customers.

1. Create great content

If you don’t have a blog for your website already, you should consider WordPress, a free content management system, which can integrate with your existing setup.

On your blog, you should post articles that offer valuable expertise and insights that draw new readers searching for specific queries. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, analyze your competitors’ blog content and consider the questions you get again and again from customers. As you write content, ensure you’re telling interesting stories, being conversational, and engaging your audience.

In your blog, be sure to include useful images and videos, and links to your own site as well as links to reputable content on the subject. Linking to high-quality sites tells Google your content is well researched and authoritative.

2. Use the right keywords

As you create content, be sure to naturally include keywords that will help you rank in search engines. In layman’s terms, these are words or phrases that your customers are specifically searching. The Ubersuggest tool is a great, free way to check the difficulty of ranking for a particular keyword, alternative keywords, the top content ranking for the keyword, and the search volume for the keyword.

As you write, use the keyword and its synonyms throughout the content that you’re writing wherever it may appear naturally. Also, be sure to include the keyword in the URL (if it makes sense) as well as the title and metadata.

3. Perfect your titles and meta descriptions

As you produce content, ensuring that your pages have optimized elements including titles and meta descriptions is vital for healthy SEO. Using a free WordPress plugin like Yoast SEO will make editing these elements a breeze.

Using the snippet editor will allow you to see what your content’s title and meta description will look like in Google search results and edit it to your satisfaction. From the editor, you can add target keywords and optimize for length using Yoast’s suggestions.

4. Opt for static URLs

When creating URLs for your site, always go with static URLs (www.fundera.com/blog/square-pos-review) over dynamic URLs (www.fundera.com/blog/?id=123) to ensure they’re easily readable and don’t become easily broken if they are linked to.  According to Moz, using dynamic parameters in a URL can even result in lower overall ranking and indexing.

If you’re targeting a particular keyword for a page or piece of content, you should include it in the static URL, but don’t include multiple keywords. With SEO, simplicity is key. Read over each URL and consider whether a reader could predict the content of a page just by reading the URL. In addition, separate words with hyphens rather than underscores or plus signs.

5. Share with the right audiences on social media

While links to your site on social media don’t directly affect your site’s rank because they’re marked as No-Follow, an instruction for search engine crawlers to ignore them, they still hold value as a means of promotion

By sharing pages and articles from your website, you’ll increase traffic to your site and increase the chance that your content is either re-shared or linked to, especially you share it with the right audience. An effective social media-sharing campaign could even result in a nice bump in search traffic. Implementing principles of growth marketing, like reviewing and reverse engineering the social media marketing success of competitors can be very effective in increasing engagement with your shared content.

While Google’s inclusion of tweets in search results, or indexation, is on the decline, it’s still possible that one of your tweets could be added to search results for a particular term if you have enough authority. What exactly conveys this authority — followers, tweet engagement, or tweet length — is not totally known.

6. Guest post on blogs in your niche

One excellent way to build awareness for your brand and build links to your website is to guest post for blogs and publications in your industry. This off-site SEO tactic can land you high-quality backlinks. With these links, you’ll raise Google’s awareness of your site and will increase your site’s search profile as a source of information for your niche.

You’ll also increase traffic to your site through the included links in the guest post, especially if they’re highly applicable to the content of the post and indicate some further value that can only be derived by following them. For example, in your guest post, you can mention an interesting workout routine and write, “if you’re interested, check out my guide on this full-body workout” with full-body workout hyper-linked to your site.

While you undoubtedly know of trusted publications in your space, you can find sites explicitly seeking guest posts by searching Google for phrases like:

[Your Niche] “Write for us”
[Your Niche] “Submit guest post”
[Your Niche] “Become a contributor”

For example, if you have a fitness education website, you can search for fitness training “submit guest post” or exercise “become a contributor.” When you submit an idea, carefully follow the instructions that the blog provides to ensure that you receive consideration for your submission.  

7. Score easy links to your site

There are a few other great ways to earn easy links to your website and further improve your website’s SEO.

One is by finding unlinked mentions or places online where your brand has been mentioned, but a link hasn’t been added. Reach out to the site administrator and politely ask for a link to be granted. If your website is relatively young, you may be able to find these mentions quickly by Googling your brand, finding mentions in the results, and determining whether a link has been added.

You can also be notified of new mentions by setting up a Google alert for your company’s brand name. Once your brand starts taking off, you may need to search for unlinked mentions with a professional tool like Ahrefs.

Another easy way to land new links is by signing up for HARO (Help A Reporter Out) emails, which will send you requests from reporters for quotes from professionals in your space. For example, if you sign up for the HARO Business & Finance email, you could respond to requests on marketing, finance, accounting, and more, and be included in articles with valuable links back to your website.

8. Build your brand

As competition has increased for domination of search results, searchers are increasingly relying on brand recognition when deciding which result to click on.

This is no easy feat, but by creating trustworthy content on subjects related to your core competency and sharing it on social media with interested audiences, you can begin to develop a known brand. Having executives at your company share their insights on matters related to your space at events and in guest posts will also help to make your name known.

9. Create a simple site structure

Develop a hierarchy for your site with main categories, subcategories (if you have enough content on your site), and pages to make it easy to navigate. For example, your blog could be the main category, followed by subcategories of different subjects you cover, and articles within each subcategory.

Your website header should follow this pattern with main categories across the topic, followed by drop-down subcategories or pages. Your URLs should also follow the same logical pattern of your site hierarchy. As long as your site is simple, logical, and uniformly structured, you’ll be in good shape.

10. Reclaim broken backlinks

As you change and create new pages on your site, inevitably you’ll find broken backlinks or links to pages on your site that are no longer live. Perhaps you relocated content to a new page, deleting the old one and its former URL. It’s important to redirect these broken backlinks to reclaim link juice and bring link followers to your site.

To easily find broken backlinks, you can sign up for Ahrefs’ seven-day trial for $7, enter your domain in their Site Explorer, and click ‘Broken’ under the Backlinks tab. This will give you a full list of your site’s broken backlinks, the referring page, and the error code.

There are two relatively easy ways to fix this problem. The first is to simply reach out to the referring sites and politely request that they add the replacement link instead. Most webmasters and editors will gladly comply. The alternative, if they don’t get back to you, is to serve a 301 redirect, which will carry any link weighting to the new URL. You can do so by following Moz’s guide on redirection.

Even while increasing SEO could initially appear to be quite difficult, many of its most fundamental activities can be completed in a few hours. Hundreds of excellent tips are available online to help you with additional on-site, off-site, or technical SEO chores that will help your pages rank higher for competitive terms.

As you plan website redesigns, evaluate current material, and consider website optimization before creating new pages or content, you will put your company miles ahead of the competition and, ideally, in front of an increasing number of prospective clients.

6 Free SEO Tools to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings

Ever wondered how to get your website to show up on the first page of search results? You have, of course. Being found online is a goal shared by all small businesses, but it’s not always simple to achieve.

There are a number of free SEO tools available, but we’ll only talk about the top picks that will be useful additions to your toolkit. A large number of people in the search engine optimization (SEO) community have looked at the tools that are discussed here. For an instrument to be considered, it needed to meet three requirements.

Here are six free SEO tools for time-pressed business owners to assist improve their results without hiring a webmaster:

1. Google Trends

Google Trends is a go-to keyword tool. You can see how search queries change over time when people search for your keyword and compare different words or phrases to see which is best.

Let’s say you run a hardware store, and you want to ramp up sales of shovels this winter. When people search for a shovel online, do they search for a winter shovel or a snow shovel? Compare the two using Google Trends. Here’s what you’ll see:

According to the chart, people search for snow shovels more frequently than winter shovels. The chart also shows you when people search for the term. In this case, it’s no surprise that the winter months are when this term is most popular.

You can also look at a regional breakdown showing where the search terms are most popular. With this knowledge, you can use the phrase ‘show shovel’ on your website and blog posts to increase traffic.

2. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

Before spending money on interior design work, getting the property’s structure in order is crucial. The same is valid for your website. Before optimizing the site, you must ensure it is in good technical condition.

Learn who is connecting to you and where you rank for certain keywords. You may complete your website crawl using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) and find more than a hundred typical SEO issues. It will also present suggestions for how to solve the problem and explain why something is problematic.

3. Keyword Generator Ahrefs

You won’t be charged to view the top 100 keyword recommendations and the top 50 related searches for every given term or phrase. Also shown are statistics on search traffic and keyword difficulty. Alongside Google’s keywords, search terms for other significant search engines are also shown, including YouTube, Bing, and Amazon.

4. Google Keyword Planner

The Google Keyword Planner (GKP) effective SEO tool was initially created for Google Ads keyword research. Since it originates from Google, many SEOs already believe the information to be trustworthy.

Our findings, however, indicate that GKP is only about 45.22 percent accurate and consistently overestimates “real” search traffic.

Also, GKP only provides a general estimate of search traffic (as you can see in the screenshot above) (as you can see in the screenshot above). However, it’s still a fantastic tool for researching every conceivable term. Most keyword research tools show suggestions relating to the seed term you entered. For instance, if you search for “coffee,” recommendations like “coffee cafés,” “coffee near me,” “coffee bean,” “coffee,” “Keurig coffee maker,” and so forth may appear.

GKP, on the other hand, uses semantics to show you relevant keywords. “Cappuccino,” “espresso,” “barista,” and “french press” are a few examples of GKP’s proposed keywords that don’t contain the word “coffee.”

5. AlsoAsked

For nearly all queries, Google includes a People Also Ask (or QA) option on the search engine results page (SERP) (PAA). When you enter a topic, AlsoAsked will scrape the questions and display the pertinent PAA questions. Examine them to see if you can find any queries or related subjects that you could include in your article.

6. Data Studio

When used to combine, visualize, and distribute data from various sources, Google Data Studio excels (like Search Console and Google Analytics, for example). Lee Hurst has provided some Google Data Studio tools to give you an idea of the kinds of SEO projects and dashboards you may develop without investing a dollar.

There are several quite valuable SEO tools available here. With their help, you can develop concepts faster than you could have done it alone. To succeed, though, you’ll need to put in the work. Based on the data obtained by using SEO analysis tools, all product descriptions need to be revised in order to produce content that is optimized for search engines.

What is the Fastest Way to Rank a Keyword?

Did you know that the top page of Google search results receives 95% of all search traffic? This implies that not many people will find or visit your website if it does not appear in the top 10 results for your target keywords. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the next. With SEO, your website will be optimized for all the attributes that Google values, moving it up the search results page.

Read Also: Types of SEO in Digital Marketing

The use of keywords is crucial to this procedure. However, how exactly can you make your selected phrases appear first in search results? To start, you may verify that your keywords are actually helping you by following the easy eight-step procedure below.

1. Start with keyword research

Once you’re ready to go, it’s time to find some keywords to use! There are a few different ways of approaching this. The simplest is to pick a term relevant to your industry and type it into the Google search bar without hitting enter.

Take a look at the Google Autocomplete results. This will give you a good idea of related keywords and phrases people search — and you can use the results to start building your list of target keywords. For a more in-depth look at good keyword options, though, there are numerous keyword tool options to choose from.

Some of these options are:

• Google Keyword Planner
• Keywords Everywhere
• KeywordsFX

Each one can suggest a wide variety of keywords based on an initial phrase.

2. Narrow your keyword list

Once you have a good supply of results from your keyword research, start narrowing your keyword list. To rank for keywords, you want to choose phrases that are relevant to your business, relatively high in search volume, and relatively low in competition. If your business is a farmer’s market, you might begin your search with terms related to food products you sell, like “apple.” But you don’t want to use all the related keywords you find.

“Apple cider”? Sure. “Apple software update”?

Probably not. Likewise, you don’t want to target a keyword like “corn.” Broad, short-tail keywords have more competition, making it harder to rank at the top of search results. You’d have to be very authoritative to make it into those top rankings.

Aim instead for keywords that are a bit more specific or long-tail like “buy sweet corn near me.” Long-tail keywords usually have less competition, and it’s easier to decipher search intent for more specific phrases — which brings us to the next point.

3. Consider search intent for keywords

To truly understand how to rank for keywords, you have to understand something that so many companies miss — search intent. In other words, why are people searching for this keyword? When you’ve decided which keywords you’re going to target, think about why people are looking them up.

If you want to target “how to make apple cider,” don’t instinctively churn out a piece advertising the apples you sell. Consider: Are the people searching for this keyword going to be interested in an advertisement for pre-made cider? Probably not.

They want to know how they can make the cider. So instead of advertising your cider, provide a step-by-step article on how they can make their own. Then, you can add a call to action (CTA) that directs readers to buy the apples they’ll need to make the cider.

4. Research competitors’ keywords and content

As you complete your keyword research and keyword marketing plan, you might create some excellent stuff, but don’t forget — having good content isn’t enough. You have to have better content than your competitors, or at least better-optimized content. To make sure your content ultimately comes out on top, go take a look at what’s currently ranking for your chosen keywords.

Go through some articles there and take a look at what your competitors are doing. Make sure you do all the good stuff they’re doing but do it even better. A great tool to use for this is CompetitorSpyFX, which analyzes your competitors’ sites for everything from content marketing to user experience.

5. Use good on-page SEO strategies

This post may be about keywords specifically, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore the other aspects of on-page SEO. Understanding how to rank for keywords requires an understanding of SEO as a whole. As you write your content, apply as many SEO best practices as you can.

Use catchy, keyword-optimized title tags and meta descriptions. Structure content using headings and lists. Above all, make sure your content matches search intent and is helpful to users.

After all, Google wants to rank content that provides the best user experience (UX).

6. Develop a solid web design

Keyword integration primarily happens on your website, so make sure your site is built for SEO. You could have the most stellar keyword integration in the world, but it wouldn’t make much difference if your website were poorly designed. A lot goes into good web design, but a quick rule of thumb is to structure everything in a way that will attract users and make them want to stay.

Start by ensuring that you have fast loading speeds so that users won’t click away before the page has even pulled up. Likewise, make the page look as visually pleasing as possible. Having the elements to make a clean web design can go a long way for the overall look of your site.

7. Earn high-authority backlinks to your content

On-page SEO isn’t the only kind you need to make sure you get right to rank for keywords. Off-page SEO is just as important. This means establishing some connections with other sites and getting them to link to your content.

You can also promote content via social media. The more external links you have leading to your content, the more Google will trust your site, and you’ll rank for more keywords.

8. Analyze your keyword rankings

Once your content is published and ranked in search results, your job isn’t done. The final step is to go back and measure the results. See how successful your content is, so you know what’s working for you and what isn’t.

You have tools at your disposal for this task. Just as you can use Google Keyword Planner to find keywords, you can use Google Analytics, along with position check tools for Google to measure their effect on your website. When you set up your site with Analytics, you can track user traffic on your content pages to see how effective they are.

Other great tools for monitoring keyword rankings are Ahrefs and MarketingCloudFX.

Final Thoughts

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is about helping search engines, such as Google and Bing, to:

• find the information you publish on your website (web content)
• rank your website against similar websites.

Search engines try to find the most relevant web content to match with a user’s search term. You can help your site to rank better against search terms by understanding how:

• customers search for your products and services
• search engines decide which content is more relevant.

Taking these steps can help to improve your website SEO.

1. Understand your online customers

Like traditional marketing, improving your website SEO starts with understanding how your customers behave. For example, consider how a person might begin searching for a product or service.

• Awareness: the customer is aware of a problem that needs fixing, and begins searching for potential solutions using broad search terms. For example, ’leaking tap’.
• Consideration: the customer understands their problem and is now searching for solutions that best meet their needs. They might start using search keywords that include a location, product feature or product type. For example, ’plumber in Townsville’.
• Purchase: the customer is ready to buy, and generally knows who they will buy from. They will often search directly for the service provider. For example, ’ABC Plumbing’.

Understanding your customers’ search behaviour will help you have an idea of which keywords to target on your web content.

2. Use keywords on your website

Keywords are the words or phrases a customer uses when they do a search. For example, ‘flowers online’ and ‘where do I buy flowers online’ are both considered to be keywords.

Matching the keywords used on your website with the words used by customers when they search for you is an important part of SEO.

3. Update your content regularly

Refreshing your website content regularly encourages search engines to visit your website more often. The more frequently they visit, the faster they’re able to discover new content on your website. You may also see some ranking benefits.

Examples of new content you can add include:

• information on new products or services you’re selling
• customer success stories
• videos or stories about your products or services
• news related to your business, products or services.

It’s also important to review your existing web content pages at least every 6 months and remove content that is no longer relevant. Some search engines will also allow you to submit and update your sitemap to help them find the new content in your website.

4. Gain referrals from other websites

When ranking your web pages, search engines look at which other websites link to or cite your page and your website as a whole. To search engines, referrals from external websites are a vote of confidence in the accuracy, relevance and usefulness of your content.

However, not all referrals are weighted evenly. Referrals from highly reputable websites have more weight than less reputable sites. The more referrals you have from reputable websites, the better your website will rank.

5. Use meta tags in your content

Meta tags are pieces of content in your website coding that don’t display on your web page. These tags tell search engines and browsers extra information on what your page and content is about. Examples of meta tags include:

• meta description – a description of what your page is about
• title – your page title which is displayed in the browser tab
• alternative text – tagged on media such as images as a text alternative of the media.

Search engines will sometimes also use your meta description in the search results they display.

6. Stay up to date on the latest SEO techniques

Search engines can change how they use web content (including meta tags) to rank websites and generate search results. To keep your site ranking well, make sure you:

• stay up-to-date on what search engines are placing importance on when ranking web pages
• lookout for new keywords that are relevant to your products and services
• stay-up-to date on new search behaviours and technologies (such as use of voice search or image search).