You must have heard of the running joke that the best place to hide a body is on page 2 of Google search results. Funny as it may seem, companies who do not end up on page 1 have enough reason to worry—according to SEO Hacker, 90 percent of internet users would not bother looking beyond the first page results.
To answer that problem, people came up with practices and hacks to rank higher and get noticed faster. Search Engine Optimization is all the rage these days, but not everyone knows how to do it correctly. Are you one of those? Read on for tried-and-tested SEO tips that definitely increase website traffic.
Focus on a primary topic and pick a keyword related to that
Before aiming for the topmost spot in search results, ask yourself the most important question: what do I want to be known for? It is highly suggested that your content revolves on a singular subject because it makes it much easier to narrow down the keywords to target.
List down all the words and phrases that you think people are most likely to type in the search bar. From there, start eliminating your options through research. There a lot of tools online for keyword search and optimization, and the best thing is most of them offer their basic services free of cost.
Use your chosen keyword/s in your page title, your headers, and your images’ alt tags
Now that you have a keyword in mind, start using it! Insert your keyword in your page title, your headers, basically just mention it regularly in your content. Be very smart about this, though–you might end up getting penalized and deindexed if you get caught overstuffing your content with the same keywords and links.
Maximize internal links
Prevent your readers from leaving your page by linking related content that can be found in your domain. Doing so encourages people to browse your content and attracts search engine crawlers deeper into your site.
Collaborate with other websites so they can link your content, too
Snap out of the mindset that everyone who produces the same content as you is competition. In actuality, external links are believed to be the greatest influencer when it comes to ranking power, simply because they’re the most difficult to manipulate. It pays to build your contacts by going over your “competition”, who knows? Maybe you can devise a plan that will put you both on the first page.
Regularly update your website’s content
Lastly, stay active. Make it a habit to update your content on a regular basis. By churning fresh content, search engines will have reason to check on your website more frequently; thus, you get higher chances of appearing on the search engine results page because of higher keyword mentions. However, do keep in mind that quality still trumps quantity. Never publish posts on a whim.
