10 Ways to Improve Your SEO Rankings for Your Website

10 Ways to Improve Your SEO Rankings for Your Website

When it comes to SEO, and improving the SEO of your website, there are many things you can do. But knowing those things is another thing altogether. So heres 10 Ways to Improve Your SEO Rankings for Your Website. Just off the top of my head!

1. Add New Content Regularly
By adding new content to your site regularly, you'll keep the spiders coming back to your site regularly. Every time you post a new piece of content to your site, Search Engine bots (spiders) can crawl your site and then index that content. But by adding content regularly to your site, it keeps the spiders coming back to your site and indexes it in the Search Engines. By adding fresh content regularly, you can "train" the spiders into coming back to your site.

2. Make Sure URLS are Keyword Friendly
A lot of people actually overlook this and are afraid to do it, and it seems like a no brainer! But you should make sure the URLs on your site contain the keywords that you want to rank for and trying to optimize for. So if you have a page that targets people that want to train their puppy in the state of Texas, you would wany a URL like www.yoursite.com/puppy-training-tips-people-texas which contains the keywords and is Search Engine and people friendly.

3. Remove Duplicate Content
Another no brainer really for most of us, but some people still use duplicate content on their site in more than one location. A big no no in today's standards! If possible, scour your site for places where the same content is being used in more than one location and try to chance the content so that's it's different. Removing it completely is better than doing nothing as you don't want to get hit with a duplicate content penalty!

4. Place Social Share Buttons
Unless your content, pages, posts etc have no social share buttons, nobody will likely share it on social media! Some people might copy the URL and then post it to their social media profile. But by placing social media buttons in your content, it gives people the chance to do that without having to do the copy/paste trick. Besides, you want people to share your content don't you?

5. Talking of Social Sharing
Always add and bookmark your new content, posts, pages, products etc to manual social bookmarking sites like Digg, SU, Reddit etc etc. This will not only help to improve the ranking of your site and content in the Search Engines, but also bring extra traffic to your site from the people using those social bookmarking sites who discover your posts on them.

6. Optimize Title Tags
Similar to 2. making your site URLs keyword friendly, you'll also want to optimize your title tags too so that they incorporate your main keywords. Never use keywords more than twice in a title tag and make sure they have words between them if they do. Using the same keyword or keywords more than twice in a title tag could be seen as keyword stuffing and nobody wants to get a penalty for that!

7. Avoid Low Quality Sites
It can be tempting to get backlinks from some sites that are almost or exactly related to yours in type/industry, but if they are low quality sites, sites that have no PA/DA etc, you might be better off just avoiding them altogether in favor of getting links from much higher authority sites instead. It's not possible to see the PageRank of a site anymore, but you can check a sites PA and DA or Moz/Alexa rank/rating etc to get an idea.

8. Improve On-page Structure
Another thing that a lot of people overlook is using tags like <B> (bold) and <U> (underline) etc when writing their content. By making use of these tags in your content, you not only highlight important words, but put emphasis on them as well which Search Engines can see and also do the same. So bold and underline some of the more important words in your content such as the long tail keyword you're optimizing and targeting for.

9. Write For People Not Search Engines
I used to be guilty of doing this! I'd write endless articles that were more aimed at targeting Search Engines than they were people. Sure it used to help my articles get ranked, but the engagement level was low. As soon as I started writing for people instead of Search Engines, my engagement levels went up and my site saw more activity from my visitors.

10. Carry out an SEO Audit
SEO audits can be very, very useful! They will reveal things about your site that you might not even had known about such as errors, broken pages/links etc. And give you an insight into your site that can prove to be invaluable. Even an SEO report can be helpful, and since there are so many sites out there where you can get this for free, you should run your site through them and see what it picks up which you can use to improve your site with!

And that is just 10 ways to optimize and improve the SEO of your site.

Do you use any or all of these SEO optimization methods?