Think about it for a second. Where do you go when you’re trying to find something on the internet? Chances are big that you’ll go to a search engine such as Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Therefore, it’s super important to make sure your website appears in search engines. Being more visible in search engines means that you’ll have a bigger chance of reaching potential customers – which, of course, is what we want. Furthermore, high ranking websites appear more trustworthy.
One effective way to boost your search engine results is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
How to boost your SEO
There are many SEO strategies. But don’t panic! There are a lot of beginner-friendly ways to do this. Let’s take a look at some methods to boost your SEO.
1. Choose a good hosting provider
You might not realize it, but your hosting provider can have a huge impact on your search engine ranking. Your website’s speed, uptime & security are some of the things taken into account when search engines rank your website. Therefore, you need to choose a reliable hosting provider that is known for its excellent performance. If your hosting provider doesn’t meet these criteria, you might want to consider switching.
Hostio Solutions can fully-manage your website
with 99.9% uptime guarantee and quick loading times
Contact us for more information2. Use an SEO plugin
There are many plugins available that are made to improve your website’s SEO. One popular SEO plugin is Yoast SEO. Plugins such as Yoast SEO make it possible to tell search engines what your pages and posts are about. Which in turn, will make sure your website is indexed faster and that your website is always on point in the search results. They, for example, allow you to edit title tags, meta descriptions, find high-performing keywords, and see previews of your pages and posts.
3. Choose a responsive design
Your website’s design plays an important role in SEO. Why? Your design can affect your website’s performance. Not only can it affect your website’s speed, but it can also only affect the performance of your website on different devices. Therefore, it’s important to choose a website design that is responsive.
Performance on any type of device is used by search engines as a ranking factor. If your website has a responsive design, this means that it will perform excellently on any device a visitor happens to be using.
4. Take a look at your permalinks
Some permalinks, such as “plain” and “numeric”, are based on codes and numbers. This makes it impossible to see what the pages or posts are about. Therefore, it’s important to choose a name structure that shows what the link is about.
Having clear permalinks not only makes it easier for people to link back to your website, but it also makes it easier for search engines to index your website. A win-win!
5. Use relevant keywords
Keywords are words that describe what your posts and pages are about. For example, if you’re creating a post on “how to use beeswax”, it would be a good idea to choose “beeswax” as your main keyword. Your target audience probably consists of people looking for posts about beeswax.
To boost your SEO, it’s important to choose relevant keywords for each page and post you add to your website. Furthermore, it’s important to add these keywords to various places such as the title, headings, and call-to-actions.
6. Use headings
To make it easier for search engines to make sense of your website’s content, it’s good to use headings. Heading also benefits the general reader. They make your content easier to read and more organized. This looks a lot better than one big piece of text and is easier to process.
7. Update your content frequently
How often you update your content plays a big role in your search engine ranking. Algorithms of search engines generally rank old content well. However, newer content can give it a boost. Why? Never content is often more up-to-date and probably more relevant to visitors than older content.
If you want to keep your search engine result ranking on top, it’s important to post new content on a regular basis. Furthermore, it’s important to have a look at your older content and update it where necessary.
8. Optimize your images
Images are a great way to make your website look more interesting. What you might not have realized is that they also play a role in your search engine ranking. Search engines, for example, prefer high-quality images that load fast. Furthermore, search engines tend to crawl your image file names and ‘alt text’. Therefore, it’s important to optimize your images.
How? Make sure that all your images are of high quality and that they have clear & descriptive filenames.
9. Add internal and external links to your website
Search engines don’t only look at your website on their own. They also index how well it’s connected to the rest of the internet. To score well on this, you’ll have to add relevant internal links and external links to your content. By adding relevant internal and external links, search engines will be able to see what content is similar to yours.
10. Create quality long-form content
When crawling your website, search engines love long-form content. This is usually because long-form content is more comprehensive, better organized, and often more useful. Furthermore, long-form content encourages potential customers to stay a bit longer on your website.
Getting on top of search result pages
SEO might sound a bit scary. However, there are many easy ways to rank higher on search result pages. Of course, it all starts with choosing the right host. After this, you can choose the platform you want to use, a well-organized responsive design, and SEO plugins.
