When it comes to increasing your website’s traffic, one of the most effective ways is to invest in SEO. After all, Google is one of the biggest sources of organic traffic for websites and with the right digital marketing strategies, it is not too difficult to get a website to rank in the top positions on results pages. Of course, the difficulty level is linked to the amount of competition in your niche. In any case, here are 7 SEO tricks and tips to boost your traffic:
1. Avoid Long Meta Descriptions
On a mobile device, Google will only show the first 120 characters of a meta description, so it’s important to be as concise as possible when writing meta tags for your website. You should always put the most crucial text at the beginning. There are many free meta description checkers online that you can use to check the character length of your description as well as see how they will appear on different browsers. The description should be written to encourage click throughs. After all, there is no point in getting a page on your website to the #1 position on a results page for a competitive keyword if your page meta description deters people from clicking through to your website.
2. Optimize All Images
There are many things that you need to do to optimize images on your website for search engines, including adding Alt Text, using relevant image file names, reducing image sizes, adding captions, and more. You should aim to keep image file sizes relatively small in order to avoid slow loading times. The Alt Text for your images is important as it allows search engines to identify images in the event that they don’t load for some reason. One thing many people forget about when it comes to image SEO is the file name. You should avoid random image file names. Instead, include relevant keywords in file names. For example, if you have a page about summer gardening featuring an image of some garden tools, instead of naming the image a random name like “tl987.jpg”, name it “summer gardening tools.jpg”.
3. Take Keyword Research Seriously
Before you start any on-page or off-page SEO work, you need to make sure you conduct thorough keyword research. You need to look for keywords in your niche that have healthy monthly search volumes and manageable competition. You also need to think about keyword variations to include in your content. For many businesses, the free-to-use Google AdWords Keyword Planner will suffice for keyword research. If you want to explore what your competition is doing in-depth, however, you are going to want to invest in professional SEO tools like SEMrush.
4. Build Diversified Backlinks
Building high-quality backlinks to your websites is a very important part of any SEO marketing campaign, but you need to ensure you are building a diverse link profile for your website. This means that links to your website from an external source should use varying anchor text. If you are outsourcing your business’s to a SEO agency, you need to make sure that they are using credible backlink sources.
5. Build Linkless Mentions
Linkless mentions are set to become a very important ranking factor according to Google and WebQuest Website. This means you want to get people talking about your business brand name without necessarily linking your website. Social media platforms, online forums and website comment sections can be a great source of linkless mentions. While its harder to track the impact of linkless mentions on SERP rankings, it’s likely that more SEO tool developers will start to incorporate the metric into their suites in the near future.
6. Always Use High-Quality Content
Everyone knows that high-quality content is essential for maintaining the best positions on SERP over the long term. Google is getting better at automatically determine the value of content for human visitors, so it’s vital that you use high-quality content on your website and for articles and posts linking to your website. High-quality content is content that is unique, up-to-date, easy to read, informative and/or entertaining, relevant, accurate and free from errors.
7. Use Internal Linking
While building external backlink to your website is an essential SEO ranking technique, your website’s internal linking structure is just as important. When it comes to on-page SEO, adding links to other relevant content on your website is a great way boost SERP ranking as it can encourage visitors to spend more time on your website and time on site is a key SEO ranking factor. Furthermore, it can help to reduce bounce rate. However, it’s important to use the right structure when it comes to internal linking and you need to ensure all links are DoFollow so that link juice is passed on. An example of a website that uses internal linking well is Wikipedia.
