Tactics To Improve Your SEO
Search engine optimization is a perennial exercise. There should be a long term strategy. There should be specific tactics for different types of content. At the crux of all search engine optimization strategies is content. You must create new content to stay relevant and ahead of your competition. However, you can also improve the ranking of your website and hence the outreach among your target audience without creating new content. Of course you must have enough content on the site already. Here are a few effective tactics to improve your SEO.
You must be able to increase the click through rate or CTR for the pages you have optimized extensively. The most important pages should be given due importance as they have the maximum influence on the overall ranking of the website. The click through rate is basically how many people coming across the link to a webpage or your website through search engine result pages and then actually clicking on it to check out the information. Identify the contents on your site that are getting ranked on the first page of search engine results. The contents on second and subsequent pages rarely draw any substantial traffic. The top ranked pages on your website should have optimized titles. The optimization should be done in a manner to entice the users so they click on the link.
A website should take very little to no time to load. If too many pages on your website take several seconds to load fully then this shall have a direct impact on the ranking. Search engine giant Google has gone on record to state that page speed or load time plays a role in influencing the ranking. The top ranked or popular pages on your website should load instantly. Other pages should also load fast. There are tools you can use to test the speed of every webpage and you must take measures to enhance it. Most webmasters, especially of websites that have hundreds of pages, tend to prioritize the top ranking pages. These pages are optimized for faster loading. Reducing size of images and enabling browser caching are effective ways to improve the load time.
Every website needs new content from time to time. The frequency depends on the industry or niche and what the target audience wants. Likewise, a website should also have its old contents updated whenever needed. One crucial time when such contents should be updated or refreshed is when the traffic is on the wane. Use analytics to find out which pages that have been performing well are abruptly or steadily drawing less traffic. Update the information and make the content more relevant in the present context. This should halt the plummet and essentially boost the traffic. Whether or not the page gets back to its former glory is uncertain but there will be substantial fillip to incoming traffic. Updating old content is easier than creating new pages.
Every type of content can be improved in due course of time. New information may be available. There can be fresh insights. Latest data or statistics and studies may have some revelations that were hitherto unknown or unaccounted for in the content. These can make way for what is known as content gap. Such content gaps in all the pieces you have on the website should be plugged. This is not exactly the same as refreshing old content. Content gaps can at times be providing completely new and different information. It is quite possible the old content will not have any trace in the new. The page should still be the same with improved optimization depending on the nature of changes required.
You should always have enough backlinks to every important page on the website. Link building plays a phenomenal role in influencing the ranking. One of the reasons why low quality pages often get ranked at the very top and placed on the first page of search engine results is the quantum of backlinks for SEO. You should get websites with backlinks to low quality pages to instead host such links to your contents. With superior content and more relevant information, the back links to your website will also benefit these platforms. You must have enough back links to consolidate your ranking.
Internal links are also important. You should boost every important webpage with sufficient internal links. This is not a tactical approach but a strategic one. You must have a larger picture in mind when you create a web of internal links. This affects browsing. It influences how search engine algorithms determine the relevance of different pages linked to one another. Internal links also indicate the depth of the website, thereby determining how far a user would go from the initial search. You should avoid creating a deep web of links. The closer a webpage is to the main page and hence the website domain that is indexed with search engines, the greater are its chances of getting ranked well and drawing more traffic.
