If done correctly, SEO can do wonders to your website and your business. While SEO experts and practitioners would bombard you with SEO services, steps, and best practices on optimising your website to enhance its search exposure in exchange of a really expensive rate, here are 10 creative ways guaranteed to improve your search engine rankings that you can do on your own.
Target the right keyword
Optimise your website according to the keyword that best describes it. Do keyword research and identify which keyword has high popularity and low competition. Be creative in listing down possible keywords. Consider singular and plural forms, related terms, and synonymous words, as well.
Fill up title tags with keyword-rich texts
Titles are one of the most important search ranking factors. Instead of using “Welcome to my website” as a title, ensure that you use keywords and related terms. Make sure that you put unique title tag in each page, as well.
Don’t forget meta tags
Fill out the meta description and meta keywords tags in each page of your website. Make sure to include primary and secondary keywords, as well as related terms.
Optimise images
Create attractive web pages by embedding images and photos. However, take note that images themselves are not crawled and read by search engines. To optimise them, use an alt tag that includes keywords describing the images
Consider keyword density
Ensure that you include significant number of keywords in the content of your web pages. The longer the body (or the more texts there are), the more keywords should appear. Don’t dilute nor stuff keywords.
Perform on-page SEO first before off-page strategies
Make sure that your website is completely optimised before going on to link building and other off-page SEO strategies. From title tags to headers to internal link structure, your website should be SEO-ready to ensure that your off-page techniques will not be put to waste.
Perform natural link building techniques
Publishing links of your website to other websites is essential in improving search engine ranking. This is called link building or submission of your website’s link to online directories, blogs, articles, social bookmarking websites, and other online portals. However, it is important that your link building strategy is performed naturally. Avoid automated tools that spam non-related websites and are often calibrated to perform black hat SEO.
Take advantage of social networking sites.
Regularly post the URL of your website on your social networking accounts and share it to your friends and followers. Not only will it help in improving your site’s search ranking, it will also attract visitors and increase traffic to your site. Moreover, if your brand or business has social media pages, make sure to integrate the buttons or links for these on your website.
Ping search engine crawlers
For every change and update you make on your website, be sure to tell search engines about it so they can re-crawl and re-index your website.
Incorporate a blog on your website
Search engines love new content. To keep your website fresh and updated, integrate a blog where you can post original and related articles regularly. Make sure that you optimise your articles and link them back to the pages on your website to guarantee good ranking on search engine results.
Optimising your website and improving its search ranking should not be difficult. As long as you know the proper steps and right strategies in doing so, you are on your way to receiving more clicks, higher leads, and improved sales for your business.
Remember, it pays to be creative. Don’t just follow SEO best practices by the book. Let them serve as your guide, but more importantly, it is your inventive and resourceful strategies that would help you get an edge over your competitors.