10 Important SEO Tips to Increase Your Websites Visibility and Ranking Online Tutorial

10 Important SEO Tips to Increase Your Websites Visibility and Ranking Online

If you're a webmaster or blogger, your main goal is to get top ranking positions in the search engines so that you can get more traffic to your website which results in more sales and revenue for you and your business. And getting good ranking positions is only possible if you optimize your website and increase its awareness online. And the way that you make sure your sites rankings improve and stay high is to comply with the requirements of Search Engines like Google without breaking or flouting any of their Webmaster Guidelines and rules.

The Importance of SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is what's needed to improve and enhance your websites ranking position in the Search Engines. There's many ways and methods of doing SEO from on-page SEO that includes making small changes to the structure or layout of your site to off-page SEO methods that ranges from social media marketing (SMM) to link building like blog commenting, guest posting or link directory submission etc. And it's important to adopt and practice good SEO if you want to make sure that your site ranks high in the organic search results in Search Engines like Google.

Doing good SEO is so very important because in most cases, more than half the traffic a popular website receives today is from organic searches. Where the rest of it is made up of paid traffic, social media marketing and direct or referral traffic you get from ads and links on other sites, blogs and forums etc. So with Google making up the majority of all organic searches it's very important that you optimize your site for Google itself. But to achieve top rankings in Google you have to know what those Search Engines look for in a website before ranking it high above others.

1. Relevancy Counts

Google wants to provide people with the most relevant search results to it's users and searchers. And the results it provides are decided by Google's Algorithms. While all of these algorithms are not know and they try to keep them a secret for good reason, it's plain to see that relevancy play a very big part in the results that are provided to people. It's possible they consider things like a searchers location and even the time of day they are searching, as well as his/her past search history and behavior too.

2. Content is King

Google places extreme importance on the quality of your content. It's long been proven and shown now that Google prefers longer lengthy articles that have real substance to them rather than just long and lengthy articles that have had keywords strategically placed in them. Unique, fresh content that is informative and helpful to the reader will improve your rankings over content that has been created with just the intention of placing some keywords in it that you want to rank for.

3. Site Speed

The speed that your site loads plays a massive role in where you rank online. Slow loading sites or sites that have a lot of downloads on them and 3rd party external scripts etc don't rank as high as sites that don't have all these extra downloads to load into the browser before the page has finally downloaded. So increasing your site speed and page load times should be high on your agenda of things to do to SEO your site. Recently, Google launched its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project which you can take advantage of and it may even be tagging sites that make use of AMP hosting.

4. UI for UX

The UI (User Interface) or UX (User Experience) of your site go hand in hand with each other. The UX your reader has on your site through it's UI is now considered to be a ranking factor. Google is ranking sites higher that are easy to navigate and have clear and easy to navigate menus and pages and have relevant links to the internal pages of your site from all pages of it.

5. Internal Linking

Your internal links can play a massive part in your ranking positions online. And since that internal links play a big role in your ranking performance for some keywords, they can also be very helpful for your readers and when used properly can go on to reduce your bounce rate. You will also want to make sure that your anchor texts that point to the same page from other pages on your site is not the exact same anchor text for every link otherwise Google can see this as slightly suspicious. Good internal linking happens naturally as and when it's needed and no more than that.

6. Multiple Device Compatibility

More and more people are searching on mobile devices these days. In fact mobile searches out perform desktop searches. So Google places a lot of importance on whether your site is compatible with all screen sizes that it is being accessed and viewed on. You already know that Google has said it prefers responsive website that consider the users screen size and adapt accordingly so this should be one of the most important things you can do to your site by making it truly multiple device compatible.

7. Properly Tagged Images

I know you've probably heard it said before, but if you want your content to be seen as completely high quality content then you need to make sure you're tagging all your images properly. If you don't include alt tags to each of your articles images then Google has no real way to identify what that image is about other than the image file name and this results in them not being fully utilized and optimized for SEO.

8. Local SEO

These days, Google places more and more importance on providing search results to people that have rankings by local businesses as these deemed to be more relevant to the searchers. Also local search results are very good for those impulse searchers that are increasing by people today who want to know what the best thing is that's closest to them. To increase your local SEO, you should take full advantage of and register with the "My Business" by Google and make sure to provide all accurate information.

9. Authority

Websites that have a lot of authority in the Search Engines are those that are seen to be useful and highly relevant to the users of them. So links from high authority sites can be seen like a mark of trust or a vote to your site. If you have super high quality content then you'll possibly pick up links from high authority sites on your own in time. But high authority link building should be high on your agenda as there is direct correlation between high ranking positions by sites that have links from high authority sites.

10. Social

One of the best ways to increase your sites awareness and rankings is to make it popular on all the top social media sites. You should post all your sites content to your social media pages that much you already know. Google is always crawling through social media sites and when it comes across your websites URL on them it will attribute this to your ranking online. But once again, like good quality content, you will want to have good quality posts and user engagement on them so that is given much more importance over posts that don't have many likes/shares etc.

Be Search Engine Friendly

Some people seem to think that SEO starts with your website and the way it's designed only but that's not true. Every part of your website from its images to the structure to the navigation plays an important role in making your site truly search engine friendly. And other off-page SEO methods are important to adopt if you want better rankings in the Search Engines. That's why you should put emphasis on these 10 SEO tips and suggestions when designing and building your site.

Over to you!

What do you think? Are all these methods important? Are some more important than others? Do you consider any of them when working on your site? What other SEO tips and suggestions would you have for improving the ranking of a website that are relevant for today?