There’s a whole spectrum of people who have to have at least some level of familiarity with search engine optimization. Those that have SEO anywhere in their job title are a given, but there’s a number of other people who need to be catering to SEO realities with their work. Those of us who create content are a good example, but there’s others too.
Even if you’re an absolute lay person when it comes to this stuff, you’ve probably heard how Google and other search engine powerhouses prevent people from becoming complacent with all this by constantly changing the algorithms that determine the value of SEO.
Here at 4GoodHosting, as a top Canadian web hosting provider this stuff is very much front and centre for us nearly all the time. We know it has some serious importance for a good number of you too. Page rankings are serious stuff if you need to have your business as visible as possible online, and as such many people make an effort to really stay on top of best SEO practices.
Now we don’t claim to be the best of experts, but here are 3 guaranteed effective SEO enhancing moves you can make to help your website climb to higher spots in SERPS (search engine result pages)
Move 1: Publish Better Long-Form Content More Frequently
You’ve probably already heard the expression ‘content is king’, and likely more than a few times too. Fact is it’s as true as can be. Google rewards quality long-form content provided it is written in ways which benefits the users of the site. To ensure this, you need to review your service pages and give them priority. With a top-to-bottom, most important to least approach. you can identify spots where you can add informative sections of FAQ to expand the value of upon page.
Why FAQs though, you may be asking. They are an excellent means of naturally working in keywords – and especially for FAQ questions that you can foresee being made with voice searches more frequently.
Testimonials are another useful resource for this that many people won’t be aware of, and working with the same principles. Search engines increasingly regard the highest-quality content to be that which is useful for the visitors of the site, and they also have more and more of the AI to accurately identify this type of content.
Longer more-detail and ^useful^ blog posts are good too, and it may be that one longer and more developed post once a month may be better than 3-4 shorter pieces published during that same time frame. Another option is to include the posts of long-form along with short ones that you’ve written to create long-form posts that go once or twice a month.
Other tips? Quotes from the experts, with relevant images that are ideally original and also about the how-to videos with some of the additional resources for the readers are known to be effective SEO boosters as well.
Move 2: Beneficial Link Building
Link building is well understood and a widely-embraced component of content marketing. The key is in creating linkable content assets and then knowing how to market them to the types of people who will find it informative and valuable enough that they consider sharing it.
The general rule of thumb for content marketing has been that you should direct half of your resources to developing content, and the other half goes towards marketing those assets. The smart shift for SEO today is to tilt that in favor of creating strategic content, and even to as much as a 70/30, or 80/20 extent.
Start by analyzing to what extent you have developed relationships with those you consider to be reliable sources of backlinking. If you’re fairly well established in that regard then you might be able to spend about 80 percent of the content marketing and link building time for creating linkable content assets.
If not, you then need to alter the ratio to spend more time working towards marketing your link assets more effectively.
Move 3: Earning Quality Online Reviews Consistently
For a good long time it’s been the case that doing what it took to receive a regular supply of Google Reviews was all the thought you needed to give to getting quality online reviews for your business. Nowadays, however, it’s just not enough because – as mentioned - Google is now just that much more developed and sophisticated when it comes to analyzing the real values out there in the digital world; they have means of determining that which indicates that customers genuinely appreciate companies.
No real ‘trick’ of any sort to relate here – good old fashioned ‘quality products and / or services and putting the customer first’ sort of stuff that’s very necessary for ensuring your business is review favourably online nearly all the time.
It is also now understood that Google will reward sites with reviews that are much more diverse than Google and Yelp.
Get Help if You Need It
It’s likely quite fair to say that well more than half of the people who’ll say they know SEO ‘enough’ really don’t and are likely putting their web presence and online identity at a disadvantage because of it. It’s perfectly fine to admit this, and we’re happy to help any of our customers who are finding their website isn’t where it needs to be as it relates to ranking for keywords.
