The study of improving your ranking in Google is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In this article we are going to give you some SEO tips going into 2021 for beginners. We will focus more on actionable SEO tips. There are many factors which determine if your website will rank well however each factor doesn’t carry the same weight. It’s important if you’re trying to improve your ranking you are aware of the factors which will generate the majority of the results.
The main factors to consider are:
- Links from high authority websites
- High engaging content
- Website speed
- Relevant keywords & links
- Meaningful urls
Links from other websites
When a new product comes to market companies often rely on celebrity endorsements to gain people’s trust and confidence. Similarly, Google relies on other well established websites to determine how important a website is. Every link from a well established (high domain authority) website pointing to your website is like a vote of trust. The more links your website has pointing at it the more important Google will think it is, the higher it will rank.
One of the main strategies for building links is providing content for other websites. Every week websites struggle to produce new content for their audience. You by providing them with content are helping them in a significant way. Within the content you provide you include a link to your website or ideally to a specific article you have created. This will greatly help your website ranking in Google.
High engaging content
One of the metrics Google tracks, which will also greatly influence your ranking, is bounce rate. This measures how long a person stays on a particular page. Google’s job is to provide users with relevant information. For example, a user lands on your website through google search. If that user stays on your website for a significant amount of time your bounce rate will be low. Google will then be more likely to show that website to the next user who uses those same keywords.
If however the user lands on your page and then quickly returns back to Google looking for another website this will harm your ranking. Websites with a low bounce rate rank much better in google. You can track your bounce rate through Google Analytics. You can also use Google Search Console to see what keywords people are using to find your website. This is very useful for topic ideas. It will also show you any errors on your website which can also harm your ranking.
Website speed
One of Google’s jobs is to deliver a positive experience to those who use its service. If websites are running slowly this will result in a negative user experience. Also, studies have shown that the amount of time people are willing to waiting for content to be delivered is falling.
If a user comes to your content and it doesn’t load quickly they will leave which will also affect your bounce rate. You can check your page speed for free using Pingdom or using google’s PageSpeed Insights. If your website speed is slow then you will need to improve it. You can also use the above tools to check how fast your competitor’s website is loading.
Relevant keywords & links
It’s important to rank well you first write for people in order to create engaging content and to keep people on your website. Next when writing content it’s important to include relevant keywords. These are the keywords people use when looking for a particular topic. It’s important these keywords existing throughout your article. They also should be used in headers, image names and alt image text.
You can get a list of the keywords google expects to see for a given topic by scrolling down to the bottom of the search results page. For example if you want to write an article on SEO tips you should include the below keywords
Google also expects to see links going from your article to relevant well established websites. For example, if you are writing an article on SEO tips a link to Neil Patel would boost your page ranking than an article without the link.
Meaningful urls
One last point is to make Google’s job of indexing your website as easy as possible. You can do this by including meaningful urls which is easily readable rather than something which makes no sense. For example: yourdomain.com/seo-tips-for-small-businesses is more meaningful than yourdomain.com/article.php?id=45
Worth mentioning
- Make sure you have an SSL cert setup so your url should start with https. This ensures any information sent to and from your website is encrypted
- Write custom meta data eg title, description and keywords. The title and description is what people see in the search search results.
- Make sure you set your open graph data especially titles, descriptions and images. If you don’t when your article is shared, particularly on facebook, it will not show an image an a description of what the content is about. If you are using wordpress you can use a free plugin which does this for you called OG.
- Try to post consistently rather than in big batches.
Additional information
Neil Patel – As mentioned he is one of the top SEO advisers and he gives away a lot of free content
Free tool – You can use this free tool to check how well your website is ranking
Link checker – This will provide you with a list of websites which are linking to a domain. It’s very useful to get more information on your competitors so you know how many links you need to get to out rank them. Also, it’s a great way to find out which domains are accepting content so you can submit your articles.
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