There are a lot of search engine ranking factors that determine your website’s position in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This, in combination with Google’s ever-changing algorithm, can make SEO tough to execute effectively.
The good news is that in most cases, you don’t need to sweat every ranking factor. Some variables carry significantly more weight than others. By focusing on the top SEO optimization strategies that are proven to increase the rankings in search results, you can perform well in search for relevant searches.
Table of Contents
5 SEO Optimization Strategies
1. Mobile Optimization
It should be no surprise that 60% of Google searches are performed on mobile. If you’re looking to attract search engine traffic, it’s time to optimize your site for mobile
To check if your website is mobile-friendly, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Simply paste your URL into the tool and Google will analyze your site and determine whether or not it is mobile-friendly. If your website fails the test, the tool will provide you with some suggestions to help you improve your site for mobile visitors.
2. Website Speed
Page speed has a direct impact on both organic search traffic and conversions. While page speed is essential for user experience, it’s even more so to web crawlers who won’t waste their time attempting to read and understand the context of a page that takes too long to load. The slower your pages load, the less likely they are to be indexed by Google.
3. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing your site’s web pages to improve your rankings and earn organic traffic. This typically includes optimizing your headlines, HTML tags (title, meta, and header), and images. It also means making sure your website has a high level of authority, expertise, and trustworthiness. You can do this most easily by ensuring that every blog article you publish is a high-quality piece of content.
On-page SEO is important because it helps search engines understand your website and its content. More importantly, on-page SEO can help identify whether your content is relevant to a searcher’s query.
At the bottom of this blog, we’ve included a link to our free On-Page SEO Guide where we detail ethical and effective on-page best practices for your website.
4. Link Building
Links have been among the top-ranking factors for quite some time now. Links signal to Google that your site offers content relevant to a search query and is worthy of citation. In turn, sites with more backlinks tend to earn higher search rankings.
It’s important to keep in mind that in the case of link building, quality trumps quantity. Your focus should be only on attracting inbound links from websites with high domain authority, a decent amount of backlinks, and a significant amount of traffic. Tools like SEMRush will easily pull data for you to identify these sites.
5. High-Quality Content
Without great content, your marketing message will get lost in the vast amount of noise created by today’s digital marketplace. So if you want to stand out in the SERPs, it’s time to begin producing powerful and compelling content.
Search engines need help understanding the context of your content. You can facilitate this by incorporating these best practices for content:
- Including H1, H2, and H3 headers
- Using ALT Text on images
- Incorporating internal and external hyperlinks
- Writing a descriptive title and meta description
- Incorporating long-tail keywords into the text of the content
- Make sure your web pages have at least 300 words worth of content so they can be crawled
The Secret to a Strong SEO Strategy
No matter your industry, the success of today’s businesses relies on your ability to be found online. Implementing a strong, quality SEO strategy is not only beneficial to a brand and its marketing efforts, but it is critical to its web presence, especially within competitive markets. Including the 5 SEO optimizations highlighted in your SEO strategy are a sure way to improve your rankings.
Looking to improve your SEO strategy?
Contact SMA Marketing today. As SEO industry experts, we have the skills and knowledge to drive the right organic traffic to your website. Click below to download our FREE On-Page SEO Guide!
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in June 2020 and has been updated.
