In the battle of rankings, website owners and developers sometimes forget that the quality of the website really drives success. How your site feels to visitors and how credible your web content is will have a huge effect on whether they linger, and more importantly, share your link with others.
Trying first one strategy and then another to improve SEO for rankings can leave your site with many tactics for ranking success, but a readership that is not interested enough to hang around and actually read your web content. With that in mind, let’s look at some ways you can combine good SEO strategies with enhanced content to succeed as you move into 2016.
SEO Strategies that Stress Quality Web Content
Good Web Content Creates Success
It’s important to have fresh, quality and unique content on your site. Blog at least once a week to feed web crawlers. Rankings reflect visitors to the site, but also their time on the site. Good content is the only way to consistently improve your SEO. Is the content just what your visitors are looking for? Do they spend time on the site? Do they follow your links?
Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
Leverage smartphone accessibility to take advantage of the growing number of web users who do their browsing on their mobiles. Smartphones represent 77% of all mobiles and 30% of all internet traffic according to ComScore.com. Is your site ‘mobile friendly’? Check to see if your site is ready for ‘mobile prime time’ by visiting Google’s Mobile Friendly test. You need:
- Text big enough to read without zooming
- Buttons big enough to be touched on the small screen of a smartphone
- Links that aren’t clustered so tightly you can’t click on the one you want
- Plenty of white space around links and buttons to prevent accidental clicks
Use Guest Content Sparingly
Back links are a great way to improve SEO, but not if a guest’s content is not relevant. Only invite guest posts from credible people, whose sites fit your niche, and will be appreciated by your loyal followers. Otherwise, forego the guest blogs.
Invest in an SSL Certificate
Google now ranks your site higher if you have the HTPPS designation. Investing in an SSL Certificate can offer your visitors security. You don’t just need the certificates for e-commerce sites anymore. If there is any type of sensitive data transferred, get the security.
Think Like Your Users
Step outside the box and be your visitor for a moment. How did they find your site? You have already embedded keywords in your web content and done research to find the best ones. Now use synonyms to your best keywords and use a little common sense in thinking how else they might query to find your products and services. Come up with a variety of combinations of queries for your web content.
Social Media Matters
You spend plenty of time on social media posting web content, but Google has not previously rewarded you for it. That has changed since late last year. They will now let your hard work on those sites be reflected in your rankings. Remember to optimize the text in your RSS feed with descriptive, keyword-rich titles and text.
SEO One Liners…
- Links should stress quality. One authoritative link is better than several weak ones
- Don’t over stuff keywords. Don’t sacrifice quality web content for keyword density
- Generally use keyword phrases in text links to your site, not click here
- Use keywords in image captions
Here’s to your SEO success as we work toward 2016!
With time its becoming more and more evident the only consistent SEO elements that remain relevant are quality content and I’d argue inbound links. The rest is flavor of the day.