Every website wishes to be favoured by Google in some way. A high ranking on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) can mean the difference between receiving organic traffic on a daily basis and never seeing a single visitor on your site who did not come to you via paid advertising. As a cheapskate, I love to work hard on blogging and avoid having to pay out to get people in. Blogs have earned me most of my business over the years, so I’ve generally come to love them as a means for making money without having to spend it.
My restaurant blogs: Just Eat – Eating up your profits and Just Eat – For Restaurants and Takeaways have over time earned me over 20 customers, because people were fed up of being exploited by the company.
Sometimes it’s easy to appear on search engines, especially when you are working with a niche market, but competing with a big company like Just-Eat is a real challenge, so I’m quite proud of what I’ve accomplished in this regard! In order to work well with Google, you need to ensure that it is seeing your site as authoritative and follow a lot of the best practices for SEO to ensure that your site and your blogs are valuable!
Poor User Experience is something to be avoided!
When Google’s search algorithms return a list of search results, the company’s goal is always to provide the best possible experience for any user who chooses to visit your website by clicking on it. Having a page that is slow to load or difficult to navigate is something that Google despises, and it will most likely relegate your site to obscurity on the second or third (or lower) page of search results.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution. To begin, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to ensure that your page has a loading speed of 80 or higher on all devices. Additionally, you should consult the Core Web Vitals Report in your Google Search Console in order to identify additional issues. Finally, ensure that your images are optimised by using the smallest file size possible while still delivering the results you desire, and that you minimise redirects both internally and in your outgoing links.
I work hard to ensure that my page speed is fast on every website I operate on. The fastest page speed I’ve ever seen is on Frag.co.uk, a website owned by long time friend and developer Dug Stokes. This is a great way to ensure that a user will get information and images without having to wait, and is especially useful for slow mobile connections which are now a high level of web traffic.
Avoiding painting the screen with adverts and popups as these are a huge turn off to users who generally just want to read your content. A few ads are fine as long as they’re tucked away and inoffensive.
Backlinks need to be High Quality!
If you’re reading this article, you are already aware that high-quality backlinks are an important component of search engine optimization. If high authority domains are not linking back to your site, this can have a negative impact on your search engine ranking position. That doesn’t mean that getting a backlink from a low authority website is bad, but generally speaking the higher the website linking to you is ranked, the better the value of the backlink.
The solution in this case is not to concentrate on volume. A few high-quality links will be more effective than a large number of low-quality links. Finding high-authority websites where your content might be of interest to visitors is the most effective strategy for moving forward. Then you can find the contact information for those websites and send them an email to ask if they would be interested in linking to your content. If they agree, make sure to have a discussion about the anchor text before moving on. The use of your company name or one of your priority keywords in the anchor text is preferable to the use of a generic phrase such as “click here.” For example: Recently I formed a new company called Ramro Synergy, which has a focus on bringing businesses together! What this means is that you have defining information in the backlink, telling search engine crawlers what the link is about. A click here is not that effective.
Brief or Irrelevant Content is WORTHLESS!
If you want Google to reward you with a position on the first page of search results, your content must be useful and in-depth on the subjects you choose. It is not sufficient to just use keywords as over time, even if it ranks for a bit, the content will fade into the annals of history. In order to build strong relationships and rank for keyword clusters, you must include related terms and subtopics in your content. You will have noticed that I have included many backlinks in this post, going to other content I have written, either on this site or elsewhere. Connecting to this content shows the content is relevant and valuable, and that the content I am writing is thought out and references things of note to the topic I am discussing. A while back I wrote, or rather spoke a really stupid, yet fun blog on Blogging in the Bath. This is one of my favorite techniques, as it means I can work and get clean at the same time! Whilst this may seem like an irrelevant point, blogs are a cornerstone of strong SEO. Even adding one Blog Per MONTH can benefit your site!
There are a variety of tools available to you for researching related subtopics to include in your content. For example, Surfer SEO and Market Muse both provide lists of keywords, related terms, subtopics, and other relevant information to help you optimise your website. They also score content, which allows you to determine how well your content will perform in comparison to the content of your competitors. Regardless of the usefulness of these tools, however, you should always focus your blog on the topics and areas you are interested in. On this news site, we have a variety of different types of blogs, ranging from SEO to business to legal, and more. We focus them via categories and interconnect them in order to boost the power and relevancy of the blogs.
As a final note, Google Passage Indexing is now operational and allows the search engine to highlight passages that are relevant to a searcher’s request. This is a really cool feature and you’ve probably already noticed it! Having a highlighted passage can help a searcher decide whether or not to visit your website. If you concentrate on creating content that is semantically rich and relevant, you will have a better chance of achieving success.
Content is NOT interactive enough!
Words can accomplish a great deal in the world of SEO, but they are not the only factor to consider. Google strives to provide a positive user experience, and part of that means that the search engine favours websites that provide more than just words. I am a very big sinner in this regard. I like information and I focus mainly on providing information, however it’s important to include a few things here and there to jazz up user experience, or you’ll end up with a lot of bored readers who tune out…
There are many different types of interactive content that can be used. When it comes to creating an engaging and captivating experience for visitors to your site, videos, audio clips, expandable content, clickable infographics, and Java Script can all help to make a difference. I used a picture halfway through this post to break it up as an example, but a lot of the time, I tend to forget it and it negatively impacts on the posts. It’s good to have videos people can interact with. An example would be my game reviews that embed my content on chanwalrus.com. This content will rank better, because it’s niche and it will keep people engaged… – When they find it that is. (Ah the problem with niche traffic for a classic game no one plays anymore…
Making interactive content that doesn’t cause your site to load slowly is the key to success. As a result, there are numerous website templates and plugins available that can assist you in providing users with the ability to interact with your content without compromising the user experience in terms of speed or navigation. Whilst I do love Divi and use it on many of my websites, especially the ones I build for customers, it is rather slow to load unless you do a lot of work to optimise it.
Think about using Advanced HTML Tags
Even if you’re already utilising basic HTML tags, it is possible that you are being ranked lower than you should be because you are not taking advantage of some advanced HTML tags that will aid Google in indexing your content.
Let’s start with the meta tag, which should be eye-catching to readers while also including your most important keyword and subject matter. In addition, you should use heading tags in a strategic manner. Incorporate questions and other long-tail keywords into your content by using them as headings.
There are a couple of other advanced tags that you may be overlooking as well.
In order to inform Google that you do not consider a page to be important, you can use the Noindex and Nofollow tags to your advantage. They inform the crawlers that they are permitted to skip these pages. Personally I don’t like to use these tags as I only ever link to relevant content.
It instructs Google to skip over redundant content when using the “Rel canonical” tag.
This markup provides structural guidance and aids Google in identifying your most important content to display on the search engine results page (SERP).
None of these modifications are time-consuming, and they can have a significant impact on your page rank.
Don’t Compete with YOU!
Another common mistake I see is when companies compete with their own pages by including repetitive or redundant content. This is one of the most common mistakes I see. If you have two blog posts that are nearly identical in content and target the same keywords, they may effectively cancel each other out and become redundant.
The quickest and most straightforward way to correct this error is to optimise similar pages for different long-tail keywords. By making something older more relevant, you may also be able to differentiate similar content.
I hope this blog has been helpful! Now go out into the world and become an invincible SEO pro!
