Ways other than keywords to boost your SEO

If you feel that your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is slowly losing its impact,you could be right. Did you know that only 25 percent of SEO is on-page while the other 75 percent is off-page? Search engines are evolving to facilitate better user experience by putting the spotlight on quality content, site speed, and internal navigation; website owners have to stay in sync with what works best with their algorithms.

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Without investing too much, you can ensure that your SEO strategy is on the right path by focusing on these key areas.

Content is king

Originality in content improves your site ranking since duplicate content can lead to copyright infringement, besides having a detrimental effect on rankings. Use tools like Copyscape, Siteliner, and Screaming Frog to check if your website has duplicate content.

As search engines are being continuously developed to deliver better content to users, keyword density has given way to content quality as a good SEO practice. Create content that uses specific long-tail keywords but also maintains a natural flow, and keep it well formatted into paragraphs with subtitles for ease of reading and good indexing.

Images add value and make a website more attractive. Use original images with optimised sizes. It is a good practice to have a text accompaniment with multimedia and images on your website.

Keep navigation and internal links optimised

Strategic navigation and placement of your internal links factor into how search engines crawl your content, and the more relevant internal links within your website, the higher the rank index. Remember to distribute internal links across your content and not just within the navigation bar.

Put your SEO spotlight on the more important parts of content on your website. Ensure that search engine algorithms are highlighting the more relevant pages. For instance, you don’t want your testimonial page ranking higher than your product description page. Use ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ codes on less important pages, including category and tag archives which usually have duplicate content, to redirect the search engine’s focus on other pages.

Use titles wisely

Meta descriptions and titles should not be too long or too short; use the descriptions to push your creative content and attract more clicks. Use click-baits and call-to-actions judiciously to increase your click percentages which, combined with quality and relevant content, will help your link rise up the search page rankings.

Get an audit done for your site that covers your on-site SEO, link profile, indexing analysis, and social presence analysis.

Speed rules

Studies have shown that 40 percent of website visitors abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load, so ensure that your website loads fast. Google also lists speed as one of their ranking factors, making it necessary that you analyse your website speed regularly. Use tools like Pingdom to break down the speed of your site to each element, and utilise this data to make changes and achieve an optimum loading speed. Upgrade your web hosting if that is a factor in your loading speed.

Mobile and social

Social media is a good traffic-generating platform, and it also encourages link sharing. Establish a presence on major social platforms like Twitter and Facebook and niche platforms that are related to your website content.

Mobile compatibility of websites is now essential. With users trading desktops for the smartphone, mobiles now account for more than half of internet traffic.

Engaged user, good SEO

Search engine algorithms are getting smarter and developing along user habits. Your SEO should also be primed keeping user experience in mind and not pivot on practices that may have worked a few years ago. Your SEO strategy will be a successful one if you find the balance between the best practices to generate traffic and original content to retain and engage users.

It won’t happen instantly, but post by post, your site will slowly gain visibility to rival even the giant companies of today!