If you are struggling to get eyes on your site, you might be wondering if there are any actual ways that you can feasibly increase the organic traffic to your site in a relatively short amount of time. Truth be told, even the most rock-solid search engine optimization strategy will take time to implement. It will take even more time for that plan to have a long-lasting positive impact on your site. But that does not mean that impact is not coming.
While you and your company work to build out your off-site SEO (important factors such as link building are crucial) and improve other aspects of your site’s outreach through partnerships, ads, and other options, there are a lot of things you can improve on your site to make sure that you are making the most out of all the hard work that you and your colleagues are doing.
So, here are very doable ways to improve your site’s ranking. Or you can find another reference here.
Remember relevant content for site’s ranking
This is without question the number one way to improve your site’s ranking and performance. It is the number one driver of your search engine rankings and there simply is no substitute for top-class work.
When it comes to quality content, you must also make sure that the content you create is written specifically for your intended visitor and customer. This improves your site’s authority and its relevance.
You should also make sure that your spelling, grammar, and the information that you provide is useful and factual.
Focus on format
While we’re on the topic of the great content that you are developing for your site, it is important to remember that you should be focusing on the format of that content as well. If you create a great post, but it is nothing more than a massive wall of text, it is not going to be very engaging at all. Even if you are employing great writers and have a huge wealth of information, not many people are going to read if all they see is text.
Remember to take advantage of bold, italics, heading tags (H1 specifically), and other emphasis tags to highlight keywords and keyword phrases. That being said, don’t oversaturate your work with these things, make sure to find a good balance so that your content is both eye-catching and natural.
Consider keywords
It is your job to figure out what keywords you want to target for each page on your site. You can of course reference SEO resources such as Ahrefs or Moz to find the exact keywords that you should be targeting. Or what you can do is think about how your reader might try to search for a specific page. Think about terms that they would use in a Google search. Those are the keywords you want to start using and targeting.
It is also worth your time to consider the site’s ranking for long-tail keyword phrases as well. While major valuable keywords can be incredibly difficult to rank for, long-trail keyword phrases are typically easier because they are a bit more specific.
Whatever keyword or key phrases you are interested in ranking for, it is important to keep these three questions in mind.
- Can I use part of all of the keyword or keyword phrases in the page URL?
- Can I use part of all of the keywords in the page’s title?
- Can I use part of all of the keyword or keyword phrases in the page headings and subheadings?
If you have much experience with keywords, you probably know that not only is the answer to all three of these questions a resounding “yes,” but it is actually encouraged that you do these three things. One thing to keep in mind when using keywords is that you want to make sure that they appear naturally in your content. Do not keyword stuff. It is also important that you should not be using unrelated keywords as that can confuse and further complicate that site’s ranking process.
Keep it evergreen and update regularly
Another important and easy to explain an aspect of improving your ranking is to make sure that your content is either evergreen (that means does not lose relevance with time) or is regularly updated! You should always be adding new content to your site for your audience to read, and the more of it that is evergreen the better.
It might be hard for you to figure out how to create evergreen content at first, but you will get the hang of it. For reference, this article that you are reading right now is considered evergreen. That is, as long as SEO is important!
Metadata is a must for site’s ranking
When you are designing your site, each page that you publish contains metadata both when it comes to the title, description, and keywords of the content. This metadata is very important to the success of the page and it is crucial that you review and update metadata as your site changes over time.
Here are the things to keep in mind when you are analyzing your site’s metadata.
- Title metadata is responsible for the page titles displayed at the top of a browser window. It is the most important metadata on your page and needs to be paid very close attention to.
- Description metadata is the text-based description that a browser may use in your page search return. Think of this as the display for the page so it is important to keep whatever you have short and sweet. You also want to try to make it as alluring as possible to encourage clicks. While search engines may not always use the meta description, it is important to create one nonetheless.
- Keyword metadata is the least important form of metadata as it is rarely ever used in regards to keyword ranking. That being said, you should already know your keywords and keyword phrases so it certainly does not hurt to add in your keyword metadata. You will want to include a variety of phrases, but make sure to keep it under 6 or 7 phrases in total with each phrase consisting of 1 to 4 words.
Encourage others to link to you to improve your site’s ranking
Remember at the very beginning of this article when I briefly discussed how link building was an incredibly important part of your site’s SEO? Often, sites will go to extreme lengths to get their links on valuable sites. After all, this kind of process leads Google and other important search engine algorithms to rank your pages and site higher for valuable keywords. In fact, some go so far as to hire agencies or SEO experts to work with other sites in order to get their links on sites with high domain authority. While that is certainly a worthy endeavor for many, it is also a great idea to try to give other sites a reason to link to you naturally.
As use descriptive links by linking keywords, it not only improves search engine optimization, but it also adds value to your readers.
Another way to try to attract other sites to link to yours is to link to them. Try using them as an authority link in one of your articles and then reach out to them to start a dialogue. Without even asking for them to link to your site, starting this kind of professional relationship based on links can be a great way to start building out your link profile. It will take time, but if you commit the right amount of time and effort to it, you will see your links, as well as your domain authority and organic traffic, grow.
Use alt tags
Make sure to always describe your media such as images and videos using alt tags or alternative text descriptions. These alt tags allow search engines to locate your page in image searches. This is especially important for those who use text-only browsers and screen readings.
