It is crucial to rank high in search engines to get a lot of visitors to your website. Some websites get more than 90% of their entire traffic through search engines. Furthermore, once you invested time and money to rank for a certain keyword it can bring you website visitors for years to come.
This long-term effect of search engine optimisation (SEO) work definitely makes it worth looking a bit deeper into. Here are three ways to improve your SEO efforts today:
1. Get your on-page optimisation right
The best website with plenty of backlinks and a large following on social media won’t show it’s true potential if you haven’t done the basic ground work correctly.
Make sure to include unique and descriptive title tags on each page. Make sure that your title tags shouldn’t be longer than 50-60 characters.
Secondly write a unique and descriptive meta description for each page. Again, make sure that those descriptions are below 160 characters.
Once these very basic (but super important!) tasks are done check that all images on your website include title and alt tags. It is also important to give the images on your website descriptive and relevant names. For example don’t call an image “image001.png”. Change its name to “screenshot-seo-tools.png” if you target the keyword “seo tools”.
Lastly, check that you link within your website. The so-called internal linking is important to inter-link different parts of your website and increase viability.
2. Use social media to send signals to Google & co.
Make sure to have profiles on the most important social media platforms, including:
You might want to add more industry-specific social media platforms to that list if necessary.
In all cases, you must completely fill out all information and include your website address in the profiles. Also try to post at least once a week on each platform in order to show some activity. You can find a good guide for Pinterest here.
3. Build backlinks by guest posting
It is extremely important to build a good and strong backlink portfolio in order to rank high for your keywords in search engines. One surefire way to gain high-quality backlinks is to guest post on other blogs.
You can find blogs to contact by googling for “[YOUR KEYWORD/INDUSTRY] + contribute”. Also try to exchange “contribute” with “guest post”, “guest author”, “write for us” and so on.
Once you’ve collected a few websites you want to write for contact them via their contact forms or via email.
Try to make the guest post pitch as little about promoting your own website as possible. Offer them a high-quality, well-researched and unique guest post. You might already want to attach the final guest post to your initial email or you might just include a short draft of it.
Guest posting is a proven way to get new visitors via referral traffic as well as increasing your backlinks and therefore your search engine rankings. However, it is a labour-intensive and slow task. You might need to contact 50 to 100 blogs to get a handful of replies and potentially only one or two guest posts published.
By following these three strategies (one on-page and two off-page strategies) you hopefully will be able to increase your search engine ranking for your website.
