Ranking on Google is a hard feat. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO has been known to help businesses boost their visibility online, but it can be difficult to stay current when this methodology is constantly changing.
So how does anyone keep up with all the digital marketing trends out there? Here are some SEO secrets to pay attention to this year.
Link building isn’t dead
Some rumors are swirling out there that link building is a dying digital marketing technique. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Link building is one of the most beneficial ways of boosting a website’s domain rating and authority. But link building isn’t necessarily just asking for a link on another website. Instead, you should keep a few factors in mind when it comes to choosing the right link placement: the website’s industry compared to yours, the website’s domain rating (DR), and whether you include keyword optimized content around the link or not. A link that links to your website is called an inbound link, and when Google ranks all your inbound links, the first thing it will look at is relevancy. Ensuring all your inbound links are as relevant as possible to your industry and product offering is crucial to boosting your DR as a whole.
Title tags should be short
Every single web page on your website needs to have a title tag as a way to tell the search engine what the page is about. But title tags that are too long can backfire, because they are cut off on the search engine results page and the reader may not get the full picture of what it is about. As a rule of thumb, keep every title tag to under 55 characters apiece.
Take time for a link audit
Whenever a search engine crawls your website, they will be looking at every single link that is either leaving your page (outbound links) or coming to your page (inbound). If any of these links are broken, this can work against you and your domain rating may be docked. So take the time to ensure all your links work, and if they don’t, eliminate them. Instead of keeping broken links around, a managed seo services company can help to rebuild these links for you.
Increase your site speed
Once you get potential clients to your website, you will want to ensure they have a great user experience. A huge factor in user experience is the website’s site speed. Because we all have the world’s information at our fingertips, it is all too easy for someone to head to another website if the one they’re on is too slow. Plus, a slow site speed can make it hard for the search engine to crawl your website, which means all your digital marketing efforts will go unnoticed. A common culprit behind slow site speed is large photos and videos — cut those out and see what happens.
Don’t forget your audience
This may seem obvious, but it can be easy to forget your audience when you’re optimizing your content to be read by search engines. Yes, blog optimization is important, but your audience needs to be engaged when they come to your website. So write the way you speak and then go back and add in keywords where they fit and sound natural. This way you’ll get the best of both worlds.
Search engine optimization is constantly changing, but if you follow these tips, you’ll be on your way to staying ahead of the curve when it comes to your competitors!