Top Ten SEO Strategies to Boost Search Ranking 2018

Wish to boost ranking in 2018? here are top 10 strategies to boot search ranking in 2018, the better user experience is the ultimate goal of Google and search engines keep updating their algorithms and ranking requirements. SEO experts are supposed to change their SEO strategies according to the new updates in order to cope with the massive shakeups in the results. It’s also essential for high ranking and improved visibility as the crowd of business websites has increased at the same speed as that of internet users. The survey of hubspot.com confirms that only in the USA more than 12million web searches are done per month while the increased use of mobile phone has also affected the SEO strategies. The article will look at the various aspects that impact on the SEO.

Relevant Content

Regardless of the many amendments by Google, content is king and its effectiveness hasn’t diminished. Effective and engaging content boosts the ranking and draws more traffic. Google considers dwelling time for ranking as a visitor spends more time on the worth reading content. Informative content, images, relevant videos, and the use of keywords are the basic ingredients of high-quality content.

It has observed that the content whose word count lies between 2000 to 2500 words gets more readers while the writer can easily and naturally add keywords and internal links in it. Google also favors the content that users bookmark on Chrome. Buzzsumo.com terms these four factors as success factors of content:

• Media enriched content
• Non-plagiarized content
• Easy to read and written in an active form
• Semantically comprehensive content

Add Social Sharing in SEO Strategies

Social media has become a necessary part of everybody’s life and Google has decided to count the number of shares, likes, and comments on a post for ranking the page higher. Kissmatrics states that social media profiles augment your credibility level and help the customer to ask any query instantly. The survey reports released by the social media channels claim that Twitter and YouTube entertain 19 billion and 3.7 billion queries per month while the result for Facebook is one billion queries per day.

Many research reports also mention the encouraging marketing results when the companies included social media sharing in their marketing. 43% customers asserted that they got information and read features of the product on social media. Similarly, a pest control company boosted the organic traffic up to 15% within 2 months with the help of social media. Don’t waste time and add the social media plugins, i.e. SumoMe, WP Social Sharing, and Shareaholic in your blogs.

Mobile Optimization

Over 1.2 billion users surf the internet from their smartphone and Google has started to penalize the websites that aren’t mobile optimized. The ranking of these websites is lower as they fail to provide comfort to users during searching. Neil Patel confirms that every year the rate of mobile searches is increasing 43% percent while Google is favoring mobile-optimized websites by ranking them higher. In SEO strategies, mobile optimization requires proper adjustment and display of the website on smartphones. Logo, images, font, content, and videos should be a balanced form in order to prevent any negative review. Make your website responsive and compatible with devices.

Page Load Speed

Pay attention to page loading time while making SEO strategies. Slow page loading results in reduced traffic. Only one second delay in loading brings fatal results, i.e. 11% fewer page views and 16% negative customer feedback while you get 7% loss in conversions. Delay page loading means diverting your customers towards other websites and loss of potential customers. Amazon claims that they are getting 1% high revenue with each 100 milliseconds improvement.

Following are some tips to enhance the page load speed which you can practice and get better user experience:

• Avoid images and prefer CSS for designing
• Reduce script and place it at the bottom of the page
• Lessen server response time by adding Google PageSpeed tools
• Configure HTTP compression
• Enable browsing caching and minify resources
• Reduce the number of plug-ins on your websites
• Decrease redirects

Add Videos

The addition of relevant videos will stand you out from the search results as video content proved its mettle in Google Universal Search while Quicksproud.com reports that video content gets 50% better rank than plain text results. It’s an easy and effective way to communicate with your audience. The graphic representation always leaves a longer impact on minds and people don’t hesitate in playing the video as it doesn’t seem boring like the text. Video searches have the potential to garner 41% high clicks. Prefer blended content to improve your visibility and add specific keywords in it to help Google in displaying your content on the first page. Adding YouTube videos to your blog remarkably increase traffic on your website as it’s a fast and reliable platform.

Image Optimization

Heavy images take much time in loading and result in more dwell time. Google and Bing both have set algorithms to check the loading time of images and they consider this factor in the ranking as well. A single second of delay means you are losing 7% of your clients, decreasing revenue, and drawing traffic on your competitor’s site. Use a good quality image and compress the image the heavy images before adding to the website. Give file name and don’t forget to add Alt Text as it affects the SEO of the website. To learn more about image optimization read the article. Tips for Image Optimization

Local SEO

Google local search algorithm is an important factor in the year 2016 as it impacts on the ranking. Google aims to serve local clients in a better way and favors the websites that include information on their website useful for local clients. Relevance, distance, and prominence are three important factors which determine your position in the local search results. Google research study reveals the following facts about smartphone users:

• Four of the five customers browse to get local information of brands and business
• Purchase rate of local search is up to 18%
• 30% of local customers personally visit the store to buy things rather buying online
• 57% smartphone users search for nearby business once in a week

To initiate a local SEO campaign, add complete address and Google map on the website. Include the phone number and email address of the business while optimizing Google My Business Page will significantly help to improve the targeted audience search.

Implement Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

The new Google algorithm updates encourage the use of Latent Semantic Indexing in the web pages. The crawler searches the relevant words and phrases in the content. In other words, you need to add synonyms of the keywords in the article to rank the page higher. Neil Patel mentions that the writer should add obvious terms in the article like if you’re writing on Microsoft then mention the name of Bill Gate is obvious. Similarly, the terms iPhone, iPad, iPod are also obvious terms which you can’t neglect while it leaves a positive impact on the SEO as well. However, avoid keyword stuffing as the purpose of LSI is to produce relevant and informative content rather only focusing on the stuffing of the keywords. Here are some tips to befriend with LSI:

• If the page title is Cricket World Records then add keywords like cricket, batsman, world cup etc
• Avoid stuffing keywords as avoid getting red flag by the search engine
• Always prefer quality content and never use article spinning tool
• Use Google Webmaster Tool to get relevant keywords

Readability

Readability is a crucial factor that Google takes into account while ranking a website and it must be a part of your SEO strategies. Readability is a measure that how much content is easy to perceive and understandable. The more readability means the reader will spend more time on the page. High-quality, easy to understand, and informative content are the basic ingredients of reader retention and known as the best tactics for SEO strategies. You should know your targeted audience and use language and tone according to them. For example, sophisticated terms and words if you are writing a Ph.D. dissertation and avoid this strategy while writing for a general public to ensure that they easily digest the content and don’t give up just because of the high-level language.

Flesch-Kincaid Readability formula is very effective to measure the readability level. Total words, total sentences, and total syllables are three necessary factors you are required to add in the formula to get the syllables.

To improve the readability of a content, always use short sentences while keeping the syllable count low as well. Google categorizes the readability level in the following way:

• 75-100 is used for basic readability level
• 50-75 terms the intermediate-level
• Anything below 50 is advanced

Simplicity is the key to achieve high readability. Use small paragraphs and write in active voice as passive sentences don’t leave a good impact. Bullets numbers and headings make the content search engine friendly.

Internal Linking

Internal linking has become a major trait of effective SEO and experts term it a significant part of SEO strategies. It helps you to increase traffic on ll pages of your website and you can rank your old buried posts as well. The structure of the internal linking is very easy to understand.

• Use relevant anchor text and prefer keywords
• Optimize home page and interlink important pages on the homepage
• Sidebar and footer are the best places for adding navigation links
• Google gives importance to the links added toward the top of the page.

Must Read: Reasons for SEO Marketing Failures
Image Via: Kissmatress.com

Mark Goodman

Digital marketing enthusiast and industry professional in Digital technologies, Technology News, Mobile phones, software, gadgets with vast experience in the tech industry, I have a keen interest in technology, News breaking.