The first thing that comes to mind when you come across the term SEO is how you can get to create more traffic for your website: which translates to brand success. SEO may not be the most leisurely journey, but it is by far better than solely focusing on traditional methods of marketing like putting up billboards at crossways.
It is also useful to note that good website ranking does not primarily focus on keywords. There is much more to it. Google has a way of rewarding websites that are user-friendly and have high engagement. Websites mark a significant improvement when visitors stay a little bit longer in the site, get to view more pages and revisit. But how can you get that to work for your site’s ranking? The following are practical ways that you could use to enhance your website search ranking.
1. Site architecture
It is vital to develop a site architecture that is easy to navigate. The only way to get your site to rank high is to make your website as useful as you can for the visitors. The first step to it is ensuring that your visitors have an easy time find what they are looking for on your website. If you make it easy for them to get around the pages, the bounce rate, which is harmful to your ranking will decrease dramatically; the dwell time will increase and have the number of pages viewed more. If your customers find it easy to navigate your site, so will the search engine bots easily crawl your website and your site will rank higher.
2. Quality and relevant content
It goes without saying: no one has the time to read something that is not useful to them. It also applies to SEO. If the user finds the content you have produced irrelevant, they will go for sure exit your website: which translates to low dwell time and high bounce rates and you can agree that the two are not a good look. Useful content will make your visitors bookmark your pages on Google, which will improve your rank. Quality content is detailed and makes use of keywords that are relevant to the content. It is time that you stopped limiting your content to 500 words and made it more: say 1500-200 words.
3. Page loading speed
One thing that will put visitors off in your site is if a page takes longer than 7 seconds to load. As a matter of fact, according to data from Akamai, loading speed of more than three seconds will make you lose nearly half of your visitors. Now that you know that optimizing your page loading speed will make you see better ranks on rank trackers such as serpbook.com, you could apply some techniques to make your visitors not to have to wait too long.
One of them is by caching your plugins, minimizing redirects and optimizing the image size.
4. Image optimization
Apart from making your image size suitable for the loading speed, there is much more than you can do for them to help your site on its way up the SERPs. You can use keywords in the image captions or title. How does it help? It adds to the relevance of your content.
5. Readability
It does not matter whether your audience is comprised of Ph.D. holders or not. Using words that will make your audience run back to their dictionaries is of no good. Making your content readable makes it useful to the users. A helpful website ranks well on the result pages.
You might need some help in finding out whether your content is readable or not. There are a variety of tools in the market that can help you find out if your content is readable.
6. Divergent multimedia
Using the only as your content may not be enough to create the type of interaction your website needs. Depending on the ideals of your audience, it is important to have content with a variety of multimedia such as images, videos, and slideshows. They will make your content more enjoyable and interactive.
Also, note that online marketers are increasingly using video marketing and live streaming and it is doing a great job in securing good ranks for them.
7.Broken links
Last but not least, it is time to get rid of broken links. Broken links are bad for your site’s usability, and they give an impression of a neglected site: which of course Google or any search engine may not be ready to reward.
The good news is that there are tons of tools that you could use to track down every broken link in your site.
If you adhere to the mentioned tips, in the long run, you will have something to make merry about perfect ranking for your site.
A really quick (and also free) tool to check your site health for both on-site search and SEO can be found here:
https://www.sajari.com/website-search/report