Are you an SEO beginner? If so, this article is for you. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complicated process, and it takes time and experience to succeed. However, some easy-to-implement strategies can quickly help your rankings. With these five tips, any beginner should improve their website’s ranking in no time.
Ensure Your Site Is Mobile Friendly
A mobile-friendly website is crucial in the modern era. As of 2015, Google started using mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor for websites on mobile devices.
What does this mean?
If your website is not optimized for smartphones and tablets, you risk losing more than half of potential traffic from users who view your site on their devices.
If you aren’t sure if your site is mobile-friendly, check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Use Relevant Keywords
Relevant keywords are crucial to getting high rankings on search engines. As you add more relevant keywords strategically throughout the text of each page, this will help increase the likelihood that Google and other search engine crawlers can understand what your pages are about.
It is important not to “overdo” it with keyword stuffing or spamming – find the right balance of relevant keywords that provide value to your users.
Where you put keywords in your content is also essential. Your page titles, headings, and meta descriptions are all valuable places to include relevant keywords.
Refresh Old Content
You should update old blog posts regularly because search engine crawlers are constantly crawling your site. If you have blog posts that you haven’t updated in months, this tells search engines that the content is stale and outdated, which can hurt rankings on those pages.
A few ways you can update old blog posts include
- Update the actual text of the blog post;
- Add new images or videos to increase user engagement and provide more value for search engines;
- Update your keyword strategy for the page;
- Add new relevant keywords to the blog post.
Overall, updating old blog posts is a great way to improve your site’s rank.
Optimize Your Images
You should optimize your images because alt text is crucial for helping search engine crawlers understand what an image is about, which improves your site’s quality score. The better “optimized” the images are, the higher they will rank in Google images.
A few ways you can optimize your images include:
- Use descriptive alt text describing each image on the page. Ideally, it should be around 150 characters long, but there is no hard rule here – just make sure it’s meaningful and concise.
- If appropriate for the post or website, add a caption to explain what is going on with the image.
- Fill out all of your “Image Properties.”
These three simple steps can make a huge difference when it comes to ranking pages with images.
Take Advantage of XML Sitemaps
Your website needs an XML sitemap because it helps search engine crawlers understand what your site is about and gives them a map of how everything on the website is connected.
Creating an XML sitemap can be done easily with most modern content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress or Joomla. Just make sure you follow any specific instructions for creating an XML sitemap that you find on the CMS’s website.
When you submit your XML sitemap to Google, it will be visible in their Search Console under “Sitemaps.” This way, you can monitor how often search engine crawlers are visiting each page of your site.
If there seems to be a lot of 404 errors, that likely means Google is not visiting all of your pages, which you can find and fix.
Conclusion
SEO is not easy, but it can be made easier with some basic strategies. Try implementing these simple steps today if you want to rank higher on search engine pages and have a better chance of being found by people looking for your product or service online.
