Studies show that websites in the first Google search listing receive nearly one-third of the traffic for the respective keyword. As such, webmasters are often eager to optimize their sites for higher search rankings, because with higher rankings comes more traffic. Thankfully, there are several easy steps you can take to encourage higher search rankings, some of which we’re going to explore in this blog post.
#1) Publish High-Quality Content
The single most important and influential step in optimizing a website for higher search rankings is to publish high-quality content. Without content — or high-quality content — you’ll struggle to achieve a top search ranking for your target keywords. So, plan a strong content marketing strategy around relevant topics, turning those topics into engaging articles and other content for your site.
#2) Encourage Sharing
SEO has changed over the years. In the past, you could artificially optimize a site for higher search rankings by building hundreds or thousands of backlinks. Backlinks are still important for SEO, but Google now emphasizes natural backlinks, meaning building them by hand may offer little benefit. You can create natural backlinks for your site, however, by encouraging visitors to share your content on social media. Each time someone shares your content on Facebook or Twitter, it creates a new link; thus, signaling popularity and authority to Google.
#3) Mobile Friendly
Of course, you also need to make sure your website is mobile friendly. With more users now accessing the Internet on smartphones and tablets than desktops, mobile compatibility can no longer be ignored, especially if you want to achieve a higher search ranking.
#4) Prevent Duplicate Content
Granted, small amounts of duplicate content isn’t going to cause any major problems. In fact, roughly 30% of the entire Internet consists of duplicate content. The problem with publishing the same content on multiple pages of your site, however, is that it confuses search engines. If the same article is published on two pages, how will Google know which version to index? To avoid problems such as these, try to publish content on a single page or location; otherwise, you may encounter indexing issues.
#5) Speed Up Your Website
Finally, check your website’s load times to see how it fares. Both Google and Bing have announced speed as a ranking signal, meaning fast-loading websites will have an easier time ranking than their slow-loading counterparts. You can speed up your site’s load times by using a content delivery network (CDN), enabling browser caching, using GZIP compression, and optimizing images before uploading them.
