Ranking higher on the search engine is a common concern of webmasters, which makes a big difference in website traffic. If a site ranks at the top of the search engine, it is more likely to be searched by visitors. Accordingly, it will get more traffic and popularity.
However, some webmasters have no idea about how to make their sites rank higher and often give rise to traffic declining. In addition to using SEO plugins or tools, we list 5 tips as below to help you increase the website traffic without striking a blow.
Keep High Page Loading Speed
Just imagine that, when visitors access to your website and they always need to load the web pages over 1 minute, will they have the patience to wait and come to the site again? The answer is definitely no. Thus, fast page loading speed is an important part of your success.
The key to shorten the loading time is to cooperate with a reliable hosting provider which utilizes the high performance servers with the most advanced technologies. In this way, your website keeps running at a fast speed so that visitors are able to download the pages within a few seconds.
Post Unique and Attractive Web Content
Search engines are always averse to the web content which is copied from others. Once a plagiarism is recognized, your website is hard to get a high ranking on the search engine. You should keep the original creativity of all the web content and remember never to copy or paraphrase the articles from other sites.
And also, writing eye-catching posts is another way to retain visitors. Generally, people are more likely to care a hang about the readable content, which should be concise and interesting. Before editing a post, you need to keep a watchful eye on the Internet and analyze which kind of web content is concerned more.
Attach Great Importance to Keywords
When searching for something on the Internet, people are used to typing the keywords in the search bar rather than a whole sentence. In this way, the search engines will display multiple searching results to help people choose the most suitable one. Therefore, you need to make sure that the page titles, posts, or other content on the website should include the keywords with high monthly search. To this end, you can turn to Google Adwords which can help you find an appropriate keyword with ease.
Make Full Use of Backlinks
Backlinks have long been at the core of SEO strategies. During the early heydays of search engine optimizers, most of them would build thousands of backlinks from irrelevant sources and boost client rankings to the top of the SERPs. However, since Google and other search engines started upgrading their algorithms more aggressively, all such spammy strategies now make negative impacts rather than offer any benefits.
Making full use of backlinks is one of the best methods to rank high in search engines. However, each backlink that you generate for your web pages must be checked carefully before being added. Go on read to learn how to get quality backlinks for better SEO rankings.
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing continues to be the king even after decades of the start of the SEO revolution. Article marketing is one of the most effective strategies for generating relevant and high quality backlinks. There are some considerations on how and where to post your content, when done the right way, it can be the most powerful SEO strategy in itself.
Make sure to use the anchor text effectively when promoting your site using content marketing. Besides, avoid over linking your content, which could be seen as spammy efforts and get penalized by Google. Relevance and context are also extremely important factors, so your articles must always be posted to relevant and high quality directories or websites. Even when guest posting, make sure that you are posting your content within the same niche.
It is important that you use do-follow directories for posting your content because Google and other search engines do not take into account no-follow links.
2. Start Posting Testimonials
The new way to generate high quality and relevant backlinks is to post testimonials. Post testimonials for products/services you like or use. Once you post a testimonial, ask the company to place the testimonial link on their website (on the testimonials page). Remember that businesses will do anything to prove the genuineness of their customers, so they will be pleased to give you a backlink.
This strategy can help you generate a few but very high quality backlinks that Google cannot negate. All it will cost is buy a few products or services.
3. Get Backlinks from YouTube
YouTube is a high authority website, and it can help you get both no-follow and do-follow backlinks. Make sure to create an account on YouTube and start posting and sharing valuable niche-focused videos on the site. You can then add links to your web pages in the About and Description sections and generate high authority no-follow links.
You could also generate do-follow links from this video sharing site. This can be done by adding your website’s URL in the Associated Website section in Channel Settings > Advanced area in YouTube’s account settings.
4. Post Comments
While blog commenting had its heydays, it’s time for forum commenting. Make sure to choose niche-relevant and highly-active forums because they are most crawled by search engines. Engage with your target audience and use the opportunity to build strong relations with them. Build rapport with them and soon they could see you as an authority in your field and visit your web pages for solutions and more information.
5. Social Media
Facebook, the largest social media site, can also help you generate quality backlinks to boost your SEO. You can add links to your web pages in your Facebook page’s About section. You could also create a Facebook group to engage with your target audience. Insert your website’s URL in the about section of the group.
Similarly, you can also include a link to your website in the contact space in your business’ LinkedIn profile. This professional social site allows adding 3 links in this section. It also allows you to add links to your other social sites.
6. Press Release
Press releases submitted on high quality news sites can also help generate high quality and relevant backlinks to your web pages. Rather than posting thousands of poor quality press releases it makes more sense in creating a few high quality press releases and submit on high authority news sites. High quality PRs are highly likely to be selected by major news sites and published, helping you how to get quality backlinks.
So if you want to improve your rankings in the SERPs, make sure to use the above-mentioned strategies.
Image Optimization
Images make a website colorful and varied, which even become an important part of the web pages. However, the nonstandard image size and alt text take a bad effect on SEO. Before posting an image on the website, you need to resize it properly for this is the best way to decrease the page loading time.
In general, search engines recognize the images through alt text, which looks like alt=”xxx”. You need to set the alt text as simple as possible so that it can get an instant recognition from search engines. For example, if there is an image of a cute dog, you’d better set the tag as <img src=”cute-dog.jpg” alt=”cute dog” />.
Avoiding Negative SEO
We develop this post to give effective tips on avoiding negative SEO, Since many people are bothered by this problem in recent years. Negative SEO refers to something made deliberately to lower a rival website’s rankings in the search engines. If you suffer this issue, your website traffic will be decreased accordingly. Not only your website ranking may drop, but even your website may be scraped from the Search Engine Result Pages.
There are many strategies being adopted to attack a target website, such as redirecting low-quality links to your website, hacking the website, etc. Follow the following tips to resolve the issues and maintain your site ranking.
Use Google Webmaster Tools to Set up Email Alerts
First, you need to connect your website to Google Webmaster Tools and log into your account. Make sure that you click “Webmaster Tools Preferences” to turn on notifications for all issues and save the settings.
With Google Webmaster Tools, if there is anything wrong on your website, you’ll receive email alerts sent by Google. Usually Google sends you email alerts when the following issues appear:
- Your website is being attacked by malware
- Your pages are not indexed
- You have server connectivity problems
- You get a manual penalty from Google
Regularly Check Your Backlinks Profile
Generally, SEO attackers create low quality backlinks or just build redirects that are against your website. Hence, you should pay much attention to any backlinks that are not typical for your websites or come from low quality domains and take action in time. As for this case, we suggest you use tools like Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Link Research Tools, or Google Webmaster Tools to keep track of these links from time to time and get to know if there is someone building low quality backlinks to your website.
Protect Your High Quality Backlinks
Very often, SEO attackers do something against your website by removing your good backlinks. They can achieve this by contacting the webmasters of these links and requesting to remove your backlinks with your identity.
To avoid such cases, you should always remember to use an email address from your own domain instead of using Gmail or Yahoo. Your email should look like this: [email protected]. In this way, others cannot work for your website. Besides, you can also use Monitor Backlinks to keep track of your high quality backlinks.
Remove Bad Backlinks
Besides protecting your high quality backlinks, you also need to remove bad backlinks to your website. The more bad backlinks of your website, the more likely that your website will be affected. Once you find there are any bad backlinks, you should contact the webmasters and request to remove these bad ones.
Avoid Content Scrapping
Another technique that attackers use is content duplication. They copy contents on your website and post them to other websites. If there are too many duplicated contents of your website, it will get a great chance to be penalized and lose ranking. You can use tools like copyscape.com to check whether there are duplicate contents on your website.
Pay Attention to Your Website Speed
When you notice that your website has a high loading time in one time, you need to check whether there is someone sending masses of requests per second to your server. If so, immediate action should be taken timely, or your server may be shut down. In this case, your visitors cannot access to your website. The very thing you need to do is to inspect your server’s log and block the program that uses the most resources. Besides, you can use Pingdom.com to monitor your website.
Monitor Your Social Media Related
Sometimes, attackers will register fake accounts on social media using the name of your company or website to post negative reviews of your website, which may discourage people visiting your website and decrease your website ranking, so you’d better remove them before they’re widely spread.
You can use Mention.net to find out who and where your website name is being used and therefore take action to deal with it. When you suspect reviews to be fake, you can run them on Google search and see if the same reviews are posted on any other websites. Another way to track such reviews is to set up Google Alerts with your website’s name as a keyword.