5 SEO Tips to Boost Your Site Rankings

Is the online presence of your small business not what you want it to be? Then you might try SEO best practices to improve your website’s ranking in search engines. There are hundreds of things you can do to optimize your website, but if you haven’t started with the basics, then your website is lacking the foundation.

To start with the basics or the foundation of best SEO practices, you should try these five tips to boost your small business’s online presence. Once you have these tactics down, it will be easier for you to venture out into more advanced digital marketing and SEO practices.

1. Place Your Main Keyword Early in Your Content

If you’re familiar with SEO, then you know that you should have a handful of keywords to use throughout your content. These keywords will likely be what is commonly searched on search engines, which will in turn lead people to your website.

It’s great if you’re making an effort to place keywords throughout your page, but what you might not know is that the placement of the keywords can make a difference in your online presence. You should use your main keyword within your first 25 words of content, near the top of the page. The reason for this is that Google places more emphasis on keywords that are near the top of a web page as opposed to the middle or the bottom.

2. Optimize Your Pages

Optimized web pages play a huge role in your online presence, and there are several ways you can optimize your current web pages. For SEO basics, you should try optimizing your pages in three areas: your web page images, the page speeds, and the title tag.

Images

Images help to improve the user experience on your small business’s website. This means you should take the time to select the best images for your content. But selecting the right images alone won’t help optimize your page.

You should start by selecting the best file format for your images. JPG and PNG are most commonly used on websites due to their compression capabilities. You want your images to be able to compress to help with the speed of your website. The larger the image, the longer your page will take to load. You’ll also want to use the file format that best suits the image. If your image is of a photograph, JPG is your best choice. But if your image contains text, PNG is a better option.

Lastly, adding alt text can help optimize your images by improving your website’s accessibility. As an added bonus, alt text can help users understand images and how they relate to your content.

Page Speed

Page speed is a crucial area of website optimization. If you are noticing that your website takes a while to load, address it as soon as possible. Users aren’t going to wait around for content to load, which means you’ll see your rankings drop with a slow site.

If you’re unsure of your page speed, you can use tools to show you what your page speed is, and some will even show you how to improve your speed. But one easy fix to make your web page load faster is to compress images. You can also enable browser caching, delete unnecessary plugins, reduce redirects, and decrease the server response time to optimize your page speed.

Title Tag for SEO

Lastly, optimizing your title tag is the key to best SEO practices. The best way to do this is to start your title tag with your main keyword. Search engines often place importance on the terms used in titles, especially the main title.

But sometimes it isn’t always possible to include your main keyword as the first term in your title. If that’s the case, search engines still place importance on terms that appear very early on in your content, so be sure to place your main keyword as early into your content as you can for best optimization.

3. Take Advantage of Internal Linking

Using internal links can help with your online presence because it establishes your site as credible. If used in the right way, you could see a large boost to your website from internal links.

But for internal links to optimize your page, you need to use them correctly. To do this, start by using keyword-rich anchor text for your links. When text is anchored for links, it lets the search engine know that these keywords are important and also helps the search engine to understand what your content is about.

4. Publish High-Quality Long-Form Content

It’s no secret that high-quality online content ranks better, but what you might not know is that long-form content also ranks better on search engines. While you need to have high-quality content that stands out, you also need to be aware of your content’s word count.

Today, writing 1,000 words of content won’t do the trick anymore. Long-form content with 3,000 or more words is bringing in triple the amount of traffic as a 1,000-word article. Not only that, but 3,000 words also brings in quadruple the number of shares on social media compared to a 1,000-word article.

5. Use the Google Search Console to Track Your Results

If you haven’t been tracking your website results and rankings, then you won’t know how your website has been doing. One great way to track your rankings is with the Google Search Console, which shows you how your small business’s website is doing in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

The Google Search Console has many handy features for you to use, but the three most important ones for basic SEO practices are performance, coverage, and enhancements.

Performance

Checking your performance will let you see how many users are viewing and clicking on your website. Additionally, you’ll see the exact keywords that people are using in search engines to find your content. The performance feature can also show you where your website ranks among others.

Coverage

Your coverage tells you which pages on your business’s website have been indexed by Google. If your page isn’t being indexed by Google, you will see errors and warnings in the coverage. The coverage will tell you exactly what is wrong and should be fixed as soon as possible. It’s vital to fix the errors because a page that isn’t indexed can’t be ranked.

Enhancements

Lastly, the enhancements feature gives you a mobile usability report. This will let you know how mobile-friendly and easy your site is to use on mobile devices.

Improve Your Website Rankings

The outlined SEO best practices are a great place to start if you’re not very familiar with SEO or simply trying to improve your online presence. Once you’ve mastered the basics, be sure to stay up to date with the latest SEO tips and trends. You might even look into more advanced SEO tactics as well to optimize your website.

If you want help or further guidance with improving your website, turn to Skoshe. Our team of SEO-savvy experts can take your business to the next level of online visibility. Contact us for online marketing expertise today!