Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a highly important role when it comes to your website’s ranking. Having an optimized content that is unique and regularly updated is always important, but this is only one aspect of a well-rounded SEO effort. However, having an optimized content that is also in compliance with the latest SEO techniques is the way to go if you want to bring traffic to your website.
At first sight, the word ‘SEO’ might look intimidating. However, this is not true. You do not need professional (and usually high-priced) SEO services nor you need years of training to learn how SEO works. All you need is to follow the basic guidelines as well as to know a few useful tricks, and you’ll be on your way towards success.
Now, you must be thinking what does the term ‘SEO Hacks’ means. Well, this is a way of making the things effective, smart and achieve the goals while actually saving your time as well. Now, let’s take a look at a couple of easy-to-implement SEO techniques that anyone of us can do.
Find the best suitable keywords for your content
Keywords play an important role when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. When someone searches for something using a search engine (like Google, Yahoo, or Bing), the results will be displayed based on the targeted keywords. So, it is important to have the most suitable keywords for your website’s pages. Depending on your website’s content, you should choose the most effective keywords to draw as much traffic as possible.
In addition to having relevant and unique content, you also need to pick a few keywords and focus your content around those words. Furthermore, you can also think of long-tail keywords. These can be used to get a larger amount of traffic. Long-tail keywords are typically longer and more specific keyword phrases.
Even though having one main keyword is essential, using a long-tail keyword is usually a better way to go. For example, you might think that ‘low cost web hosting’ is the perfect keyword phrase for your content. But, a quick search in Google AdWords Keyword Planner will show that ‘cheap web hosting’ phrase has a higher search volume. What this means is that you should optimize your content for both of these long-tail phrases. As you can see, Google AdWords Keyword Planner is an invaluable tool for checking the most suitable keywords.
Responsive Design is The Key to Success
More than half of digital traffic now comes from mobile phones and other hand-held devices. This is why it’s essential to keep your website mobile friendly and integrate it into your SEO strategy.
Google has recently rolled out the Mobilegeddon update that boosts the mobile-friendly algorithm and promotes websites that employ responsive design. This is why numerous website owners have seen ranking and traffic changes from Google’s mobile search results. This is why it has never been more important to have a responsive website that is optimized for differently sized screens.
There are many online tools that are designed to check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not. These tools can scan your website and check different aspects of it, as well as its compliance to basic SEO principles. Still, the basic things you need to keep in mind to make your site mobile friendly are: your content should not be wider than the screen, the text shouldn’t be too small to read, the links should be far from each other and the mobile viewport should be set.
Also, it is import to be highlighted that Google will penalize your website if it is not mobile friendly. So, if you haven’t done this already, responsive design should be the first on your list of priorities.
Google AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages
Investing in mobile optimization for your website is not enough to stay on the top in the Google Search. Not every responsive design is done right, which is why it’s important to make sure that your website both works and looks great. Do not sweat it, Google AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages is there for you. It will help you to improve your website’s loading speed, improve the ranking of your site and ultimately decrease your website’s bounce rate.
Accelerated Mobile Page is an open-source coding standard that helps your website load quickly on mobile devices. Until now, AMP has been used for enhancing user experience, but since Google has taken a deeper look at responsive design, this has become a trending topic among web designers. The main idea behind this is that every kind of content, even if it is a simple text, video, animations and graphics, must load instantly on every hand-held device.
Now, let’s talk about SEO benefits of AMP. The website that is AMP-enabled will be shown up on the Google News Carousel. As a result, your website will get more attention while it’s featured as an AMP site. This will also increase your page load time. The faster your page, the higher the rank.
Use Infographics as a SEO Tactic
It is expected that infographics will soon play an important role when it comes to SEO.
An infographic is a way of representing information in a visual manner. Since this is a combination of info + graphics, you need to make sure to use the most relevant data in addition to amazing-looking graphics.
Based on your site/product, find a trending topic which is being searched the most and create an infographic. Now create an in-depth article based on your newly created infographic and publish it. This way, your article will be shared by the visitors which should help promote your website.
This kind of activity can be used to generate back-links to your website. Apart from that, this also increases your content’s credibility and sparks conversation. This also works great with social media, where you can post and promote your article. This is a so-called evergreen asset, which plays an important role in increasing your website’s popularity.
Video Content Will Prevail
Video content makes a greater impact on your website’s visitors than reading a long article. So, video content is the best technique to draw traffic to your website as well as to engage with your visitors.
Videos are also the most shareable asset of your website. You must also know that by maximizing the number of videos, you can improve your page rankings. Create a video for your site/content, upload it to YouTube and link it on your site.
While creating a video for your site, make sure that it is relevant to your content, as well as that it provides accurate information about the product/service you are referring to. Apart from online video channel, you should upload it on your own site as well, as visitors will come across your site while searching for it within a search engine.
Do you have any other tips and tricks that are worth trying out? We would love to hear from you in the comments below.
Video and infographic will definitely have a big SEO impact. Google amp is great at time but sucks when it breaks the page css and elements.
That’s a great article Rahul, but what about Voice search optimization.
In the last five years, the use of voice search has increased dramatically, mostly because voice-recognition technology has become more accurate than ever. Four years ago, Google had a 23% error rate, and last year, the rate decreased to mere 8%. And if the technology continues to improve, more people will definitely start using it to search the Internet.
Hey Chirag, you’ve made a good point here. I liked the way you went ahead and did research on speech recognition word error rate. Certainly, the use of voice recognition technology tool like Siri and Cortana has tremendously increased in past few years. In next coming years, voice search may replace text-based queries. Webmasters will have to redesign their SEO strategy by optimizing their website for voice searches.
Nice read Rahul. I was searching for the latest SEO trends in 2017, and came across the post of Rand Fishkin (Founder of Moz). I thought I should share his opinion here. According to Rand, Amazon search will have 4% or more of Google’s web search volume by end of year as Amazon will beat Google in product searches. Also, Amazon may grow its search penetration and volume in next coming years.
Thanks Darshan for sharing Rand Fishkin’s opinion on this post.
These are really good techniques, Rahul !! As SEO prospective, Google AMP is certainly helpful in page load speed as they give more preference to a web page which loads faster comparing to the contents.
Adding infographics to website seems a good featuring on SEO.
can you suggest something which can lead more infographic visits of a website?
Thanks for the post, Roger! Well, that can be a lot. The best way is to publish your infographic on your website, blog and spread them on image social media websites like Pinterest, StumbleUpon, etc. It will automatically increase the visits as it is shared among more and more people.
Hi Vikas,
Good to know that your site got listed on the first page by using our tricks. You should search more related/suitable keywords for your pages in Google AdWords Keyword Planner and use them. Make sure that you have completely relevant content on your pages, update your pages regularly to keep them live, etc.
Hi Rahul,
Thanks, the real latest techniques for SEO. I was able to increase a lot of traffic for my site after applying these techniques. Thanks a bunch. You have covered the most required points in your post which can by performed even by any designer or developer without paying anything to SEO professionals. Keep sharing such post 🙂
Such n great post. SEO Is all about optimizing your content so that search engine like to show it as a top result. you are absolutely right we can use infographics as a SEO tactic Infographics create the perfect message, an infographic is something that can turn a complicated subject into a attractive experience. It is the most effective strategy in digital marketing to present a data or information. Amazing guide, i love to read this. Thanks for sharing.
Glad you liked the article, Hazel. Please feel free to comment if you have any other point to add which can help out with SEO tactics.
Rahul, good points indeed. I got very good results after I started publishing info-graphics on my site which further got re-published on many other websites with backlinks. Mobile usable, responsive, fast websites are must. Videos get longer dwelling time, decrease bounce rate and pogo-sticking.
Recently I am seeing that site security (SSL & https) is becoming more and more crucial for organic ranking.
In coming years, voice search and voice search optimization techniques are going to be interesting to watch.