SEO is both the greatest ally and the most dangerous enemy of your website. It can do miracles if you use it right but can also destroy your search rankings if you ignore its importance. Developing a plan is even more important in this time and age, especially now that there are millions of sites out there and thousands more appear every day. How do you stand out?
The only answer to this question is optimising your SEO. Some methods take weeks to work while others can bring results in a couple of days. Let’s focus on the latter and show what you can do right now to boost your rankings!
1. Optimise Your Title, Meta Tags, and URLs
This is the most known and perhaps the oldest SEO you tip you can find, but this doesn’t make it less significant. In fact, this method is possibly the most efficient way to boost your online rankings.
So how do you optimise your title, meta tags, and URLs? Put your main keyword in the page title and the page URL. This helps the search engine understand how your content is related to the keyword. Additionally, insert your keyword, among the others, into the meta tags of the page. Although some people may argue that meta tags are needless, why not put them anyway? It won’t take much of your time!
2. Link Your Website to Google Webmaster Tools
If you do not register your website on Google’s or any other webmaster tool, you are pretty much driving with your eyes closed. There is not a single reason why you should not take advantage of the information provided to you by the search engines.
Some people believe that by not using the webmaster tools, they can “hide” something from the search engines and reach the top of the search page with some tricks. Actually, it’s the other way around, and your website and by extension, the entire account may get banned because of these suspicious activities. Instead, connect your website to Google and Bing webmasters and use precise and valid data to help you improve your search rankings.
3. Improve Your Content
If the content on your site is out-of-date, irrelevant, or low-quality, people will probably leave your site and never return. This gives search engines a hint that your website is not as useful for the users, which results in the decrease of your page ranking.
If you want to keep users on your site to reduce bounce rate and maybe even attract more visitors, you should ensure that your content is written well and down-to-earth is relevant to the keywords used in it and offers real solutions to the problems the visitors could be looking for.
4. Improve Your Website’s Loading Speed
Yet another user-related tip that can both crush your site’s SEO or lift it up to the top of the search results. If your page takes more than just a couple of seconds to load, the users will probably just leave and look for a better website, increasing your bounce rate and lowering your search ranking.
There are plenty of ways of optimizing your webpage, including using as large images as you need, optimizing your code, not stuffing the page with ads, avoiding using flash and animations, and generally making the site as simple and light as possible.
5. Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
Don’t think that you are the only entrepreneur trying to improve your search rankings. This applies to both global and local SEO, so regardless of whether you are making something for the outside world or are trying to focus on the bike market in Malaysia, you should definitely keep your eyes wide open for what your potential competitors may be doing.
Research the keywords, check on the domain strength of similar sites, and try to create something different. Don’t just try to blindly repeat what others are doing; you won’t be able to compete against “heavier” websites.
