Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is described as a technique or strategy that involves using selective keywords, creating a good user experience, or building links that can help your website to rank at the top of the Search Engine Result Page. Some top techniques of SEO that you can use for your business today are given below. Read on!
Finding Keywords and Topic Ideas
Keywords still matter in 2024 and it’s one of the best ways to attract traffic to your website. Without doing any keyword research, your SEO strategy is bound to fail and your site ranking will be affected quite massively. So, before you start making the content, you need to do some keyword research. There are some SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz etc. that can help you to find some high ranking keywords. However, all these tools are paid and cannot be used without subscribing to them first.
There are some other ways to find the keywords as well, one way to discover untapped keywords is Reddit. To find keywords, just head over to Reddit and search for the topic you’re looking for. For instance, if you want to write about the keto diet then just write “keto diet” in the search bar and see the results that come up. Scan all the threads and subreddits and find the terms that are appearing again and again. If people are searching for the specific term on Reddit, then chances are they are looking for it on Google as well.
Wikipedia is another source from where you can find the keywords. It is quite simple as well, just go to Wikipedia and search any keyword you want, such as “paleo diet”. After that, keep an eye on different sections of the page like the “content section”, “Internal Links”, “See Also” section. You will find a variety of keywords and topic ideas from the single keyword entry on the Wikipedia page.
Improve User Experience on the Entire Website
Let’s take an example of Google, it is by far the biggest search engine that provides the best possible results to the users for their queries. That is because Google only understands the statistics and ranks only the useful and question-related answers at the top. Google has become an icon for correct answers and thus would not harm its reputation. So, if your site does not answer the specific question a user is asking and has a bad experience, chances are that Google will push your site at the bottom on the SERPs due to the higher bounce rate as they want to pull up the sites with strong user engagements at the top.
So, the question is how you can improve the user experience on your site? To find the answer to this question, you need to find out the factors that affect the user experience. There are multiple factors like page loading speed, mobile usability, and intrusive pop-ups that force the visitors to bounce back to the search results. If your site has any one of these things then users aren’t going to stay long on your website which will definitely increase your site’s bounce rate. To find all these metrics, you can use different tools like Google Analytics, Google PageSpeed Insights and some other web analytics tools. Once you have figured out what is affecting the user experience, you will be able to make changes to your site accordingly.
Of all these factors, page speed is critical for SEO. In the past, a website with slow loading speed could get away with it. But, now it’s impossible because a slow website annoys the users and they ultimately leave the site without engaging with your content at all. Also, Google considers page experience as an important ranking factor. So, if there is anything that is slowing down your site speed, just get rid of it and try to remove all the non-essential elements from your site.
Optimize the Website According to Google RankBrain
Google RankBrain is the first machine learning algorithm that measures how users interact on the first page of the Google search result. It is one of the important factors in the Google search engine rankings. With this algorithm, Google tries to find out whether you’re making the user happy or not. If the user is happy, then Google will push your rankings in the SERPs. So, it is quite critical that you optimize your site according to the RankBrain algorithm. So, the question is how you can optimize your site according to RankBrain? There are two simple and easy ways that can work for you. The first one is increasing organic click-through rate (CTR) and the other is improving your site bounce rate.
By increasing the organic click-through rate, you tell Google that users engage on your website and they push it further in the search results. To improve your site organic click-through rate, you can use a tool like SerpClix which is a web-based SEO tool and helps you to get more traffic on your website.
To improve your site bounce rate, you want the users to stay at your site. If a user leaves your site after 3 seconds, then it sends the signal to Google that users don’t like your content. As a result, you will see a dip in your site ranking. To stop it from happening, you need to make some changes to your website which we have suggested under the user experience heading.
Link Out to Relevant and Quality Websites
Linking out to relevant and quality sites is still important for SEO in 2024 and it is one of the major sources of getting traffic to your websites. The web pages that link to some high-quality resources tend to establish themselves as useful content in the eyes of search engines, especially Google. Do you guys remember the Hilltop algorithm which was released by Google over 10 years ago?
Yes, Hilltop is still used by Google to rank websites. With Hilltop, Google finds whether the page is a hub of information or not. The question is how do they determine it? The Hilltop algorithm looks for the quality and relevant outbound links. If the published content has the quality and relevant outbound links, then it will show Google that the page is a Hilltop Hub.
Measure SEO Performance
Measuring the performance of SEO is quite important and for that, there are a number of reporting and analytics software that can help you to find out what’s working and what’s not working in your SEO strategy. Like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can tell you about things like:
- Which keyword is bringing traffic to your website
- Which webpage has the least number of views
- What part of the site has the UX problems
Once you have figured out how your website is responding to the SEO you have implemented, you can further amend it for better and fast results.