Advanced Search Engine Optimization Techniques
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a top concern for digital marketers and small business owners, as it should be. its especially complicated when you have limited time, money, and other resources. Your website's search engine optimization can be the difference between success and failure. SEO is constantly changing with ranking factors and website rankings always evolving. SEO requires expert guidance, the basic techniques are easy to learn and can be applied to a website quickly. Here are some advanced search engine optimization tips for modern SEO specialists:
1. Avoid Private Blog Networks (PBN)
From the moment Google announced they “have no plans to do further updates” to PageRank, there’s been no way of knowing exactly how Google measures a domains quality. Hundreds of websites dramatically lost their rankings after Google started rolling out their anti-SEO black hat updates. Anyone who dabbled in link exchanges, comment linking, content spinning and many other grey / black hat tactics were either penalized or suddenly lost their rankings. What did we learn from this? Google doesn’t like fast, cheap, spammy SEO, and PBN’s reek of these qualities.
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a network of authoritative websites used to build links to your money website(s) for the purpose of ranking higher in the Google search engine. The idea of a private blog network is that the websites appear unrelated to each other, therefore natural links, as opposed to someone linking to their own website from their other websites.
2. Don’t Ignore Your On Page SEO
On Page SEO is one of the most fundamental elements of SEO. Our goal with on-page SEO is to optimize an article in a natural, but smart way, so that search engines can easily pick out the target keyword and bring our website targeted visitors.On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. On-page SEO has changed over the years, so it's important to keep up with the latest practices.
On Page SEO considers many factors including keywords, meta descriptions, navigation, site security, internal links, external links, site speed, ads, word count, mobile friendly pages, images, social sharing buttons,responsive design, SEO friendly urls, and video content. Do what you can to keep your page quick, user friendly, and easy to navigate.
3. Longer Content Leads The Way
There’s a classic case study that demonstrates the effectiveness of long-form content in generating more conversions. According to SEO professionals “Content is King”. Even though some people still believe that backlinks are far more important, I do believe that content is still very important, but probably not in a way that you are use to hearing about.The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words. The higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content each web page has. So you might be better off publishing a lengthy blog post or article once a week rather than quick blurbs daily.
Even though long-form content is a great way to establish your site as an authority on a particular subject and to help you rank better, you shouldn’t publish everything as long-form content. Some subjects don’t require lengthy content.
4. Optimize For Voice Search
We found that there were a total of 33 million voice-first devices in circulation and a variety of similar devices. Google announced that one-fifth of the queries on Google are voice searches.Your website, content, and keywords, and overall SEO tactics need to start reflecting that and optimizing for voice. Keywords will often times be long-tail and conversational instead of a few words. Your writing should reflect how people actually speak, especially how they ask questions and expect answers. This will continue to be a growing trend as these devices become more popular and more advanced. Automobile manufacturers are now starting to include them as built-in features in new cars, so people can do voice searches while they're driving.
5. Keep Your Website Fast & Secure
One of the fundamental ways you can secure your website is by enabling secure sockets layer or SSL. SSL is a protocol that encrypts the communication between your user’s browser and your website. I'm predicting that Google will take two factors even further when it comes to search rankings. First off, websites without an SSL Certificate will continue to drop in search rank. I finally added a free SSL certificate to this site (and my other websites) relatively recently and my rank improved significantly within a couple months! Secondly, websites that load too slowly (especially due to heavy ads or external content) will also see their pagerank fall significantly. Website visitors these days have no patience so if your website takes more than a few seconds to load they're going to bounce off your site immediately. So overall I'd make it a major priority to keep your websites fast and secure in the new digital age! Speed is important because many users and clients will walk away in case the website is not loading fast. Moreover, the search engines will also penalize you if your website does not load fast enough. What are your choices?
6. Produced Quality Content
Quality content is evergreen; it stands the test of time and keeps people coming back for more. One of the reasons is that we all have read roughly the same article about 5 times without really noticing it, until now. In the early days of content marketing, the focus was on creating as much content that was possible. Even websites that worked with a digital marketing agency would have similar fluff content because it got the clicks.
When your business offers content your ideal customers care about, they’ll download it, share it and revisit it. All these actions benefit your business by generating new leads or nurturing existing customers. If your content appears higher in search engine results, then people are more likely to discover your business and click through to your website than if you were placed lower on the page. Google wants to provide searchers with the best results possible, which is why it places high-quality content near the top of results.
7. Machine Learning Is Changing SEO Algorithms
If you still aren’t sure how machine learning is changing SEO, it’s time to pay close attention. Although machine learning isn’t new (it’s been around and has been used for years), we must learn new skills and adapt to how things are rapidly changing with the rise of this technology.
When Google released RankBrain, they did not inform the public about it until after it was released and being used. Google’s RankBrain and Hummingbird are some of the first programs on the market that have the ability to learn about the users, so they can update their programming to better serve the user. While there have been little updates to these programs, there is still the possibility of them changing the way that the SEO algorithms work within the near future.
8. User Experience Optimization
One of the most significant evolutions that has happened over the years is SEO professionals growing up to be real marketers.The typical SEO professional does have to be a full-fledged UEO expert. However, they should have an understanding of many of the basic website UEO principles. The user experience has been part of SEO for a long time, to some degree. Google has started to favor sites that are optimized for most devices, load within a short time, and have users that stay on the website for a long time.
However, in the age of modern marketing it is possible that we will see UEO become a major part of SEO. This could be due to the higher number of users on mobile devices. There are many testing tools offered by Google, which have stats that were not a major part of ranking in the past. This could mean that you need to optimize now or face lower search rankings.
Google and other search engines are secretive when it comes to SEO and exactly what is used to rank a web page. Determining exactly the way Google ranks websites has been something digital marketing companies have been trying to figure out for years. It is too early to overhaul every SEO strategy that is working today, but you should watch to see how SEO trends affect your website’s numbers. Working with a SEO agency can help your business stay on top of the latest trends in SEO and to keep their website high up the ranks.
9. Google My Business
If you haven’t already done so you should create a Gmail account for yourself, so you can easily log into all of Google’s apps and products. Google My Business is one such tool available for free that gets your business pinned on Google Maps and if Google sees the right signals you’ll show up high in the local rank results too. The local rank results are those results you’ll see when Google has understood your search query to be location specific.
Try typing ‘plumbers near me’ into Google and you’ll likely see a few ads and some localized listings before you see the organic search results. This could be 1 – 3 ads or 3 or 4 local listings depending on how competitive the market is. Those local listings are valuable to your business and by creating and verifying your business with Google you’ll have at least initiated the steps it takes to get listed in those local listings. Once you have the account, fill in everything you can. Provide photos and use your service and locality keywords in the description and anywhere else you see a sincere opportunity.
10. Local Citations
Local citations are when your business is listed in local directories. It's an old-school SEO tactic for sure, but depending on your business it can still be very useful. You’ll only need to do this once anyways and it’s pretty simple. Just look up your location with the word ‘directories’ after. There are some obvious ones like Yelp and Trip Advisor, but you may find some niche directories for your locality as well as your service too. Don’t ever pay for these since those paid directories might have already been flagged by Google. Paying for links or citations will almost always harm your ranking efforts in the end.
11. Positive Business Reviews
When it comes to local customers, online reviews are golden. They’re testimonials that other potential clients can trust. Requesting these from previous customers is totally fine; however, falsifying them is not. Don’t have them log into their Gmail account from your computer to leave a review or Google will see that your reviews all come from the same IP address and the reviews then won’t help your rank.
12. Guest Post On Other Websites
Guest posts are one of my favorite ways to drive more traffic to a website. I use this strategy all the time. Building a healthy collection of backlinks is essential to any SEO campaign, and with guest posting, one has all the opportunity to add relevant links. And with Google currently penalizing sites that it feels are only there for the links, it makes sense to ensure that your backlinks are of the very best quality and the only way to ensure this is to enlist the help of an established SEO company. The links would be placed in the guest blogs in such a way that Google would recognize them as being part of relevant, organic and high quality content.
13. Accept Guest Posts On Your Site
Everyone wants to write guest blog posts for other high authority websites in their niche, but allowing high quality guest blog posts to be published on your website helps a great deal as well. Your guest bloggers will be more likely to share the published article on their social media, and maybe even link back to it on the websites they own. If you’re looking for a simple way to ramp up your content generation without actually spending more time, energy, or money to do so, simply host guest bloggers on your site.
14. Increase Visitors Average Time Spent on Site
There are a few easy ways to increase time on site.You can:
- Optimize your website’s performance to improve load times.
- Provide content suggestions to keep people reading.
- Use exit intent popups to dissuade visitors from leaving.
- Make smart use of internal links.
You can also provide additional internal links to other complimentary articles on your website to keep the visitor engaged. You can include these internal links throughout your post but definitely make sure to have at least one at the end of your article.
15. Increase Referral Traffic
Visitors that come to your website from sites other than the major search engines are considered referral traffic. The originating website is called the “referrer” since it refers traffic from one website to the other. Boosting referral traffic is always important for your SEO goals. Besides just guest posting as mentioned above, there are other effective ways to boost your referral traffic. Participating in interviews and expert roundups will expose your brand to new loyal audiences and bring new traffic to your website. Social media platforms also provide a significant amount of referral traffic.
16. Social Media Marketing
Social media is often left off the list of SEO best practices, but it can be just as important as anything else. While social signals aren't considered much of a ranking factor directly, indirectly they can help a great deal. Google places a lot of emphasis on overall website traffic to a page and social media posts can drive a lot of that. They can also drive a lot of brand awareness and inquiries which results in more searches for your business on Google and more organic traffic. Over time both of these factors will improve your page rank.
The advanced Search Engine Optimization techniques and strategies in 2018 are expected to improve the functionality and quality of a large number of websites.
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