Best Organic SEO Tips To Drive Your Search Engine Rankings

Search engine optimization is the foundation of digital marketing and e-commerce. Regardless of how good your content is or innovative your products are, if potential clients can’t find you, then you are largely wasting your time. Statistics indicate that the top result in the Google search engine attracts more than 33% of the entire traffic. This is an incredible number of visitors and can make a difference in your marketing outcomes as well as your sales.

The ability to rank high in organic search results is thus a deal-breaker. For this reason, many companies invest a lot in SEO with mixed results. There are many things that you can do to improve your ranking on search engine results. Here are some great tips on how to improve your search engine ranking.

Understand Where You Are

You cannot improve on your search engine rankings if you do not understand where you currently rank. Therefore, the first step in to improving your rankings is SEO analysis. At this point, it is also advisable to use experts or a variety of tools to understand your ranking. It might be helpful to also understand where your competitors rank as well. This forms a useful yardstick for your SEO efforts and you could also learn a lot from your competitors who are doing a better job than you in search engine rankings.

Understand Relevant Keywords

Search engine ranking has a lot to do with keywords and using them properly helps you to get better rankings. Keywords are words and phrases that are associated with your industry and which your clients are likely to use when searching for your products and services. Keywords do not just include product words but also include location and other filters that narrow down the people who search for you online to just the ones you want. Incorporating these keywords into the pages of your text can boost your rankings and draw more qualified leads to your website. When using keywords, one should consider using a mix of exact, broad and long-tailed keywords.

There are a number of tools that you can utilize to get the right mix of keywords. These include Google AdWords and many others.

Write Quality Content

One of the little-known secrets about ranking higher on search results is the quality of content that you give to users. Google search bots have a preference for content that is often quoted, linked back to, or shared. This is because it tells search engines that this is useful information and thus is often ranked higher. Apart from getting better rankings, having high-quality content on your site has other advantages. It means that clients see you as an authority in the area that you are operating in. Even if they stumbled on to your website and were not planning to buy anything, they are likely to remember your website when they need your services. They are also likely to share the information with their friends and this creates even more unique visitors to your website.

Use Cornerstone Pages

Most websites tend to have a number of pages that are thematically connected around the products or services that the company offers. Creating a cornerstone page means having a page that brings the most important keywords together and which acts as a master resource that is easily identifiable by search engine bots. The trick with creating effective cornerstone pages is identifying the right content to put there as well as ensuring the strategic use of keywords. If you get this correct, you are then likely to draw in visitors into your site and who will probably explore other pages on the website.

Optimize Page Titles

The metadata on your webpages should be optimized to ensure that they contain the right keywords and are as concise as possible. You should also ensure that you do not duplicate content as Google bots tend to down-rank pages that have duplicated metadata. The trick is to use less than 70 words and ensure that powerful keywords are used at the beginning of the metadata. It is always a great idea to also have brand keywords in your metadata which helps to boost your brand identity.

Make Use of ALT Tags

ALT tags play a critical role when it comes to improving your SEO. Typically, this text is not displayed to the user but it helps search engine bots to identify appropriate images when searching the web. Digital marketers can make use of this feature by adding specific keywords to the ALT tags in order to make them easier to rank by search engine bots. When developing ALT tags for your site, ensure that the text is concise and ideally, should be between three and six words. It is also very helpful to include the topic of your page in the ALT tags. Make sure that you don’t cram keywords into the ALT tags as this may lead search engine bots to downgrade your rankings.

Optimize Your URL Structure

URL or Unique Resource Locator is the line that appears on the URL bar at the top of your page. The URL structure plays a major role in how search engines find your websites and how they rank them on search results. Experts have found that shorter URL sentences tend to have better results than longer ones. For this reason, it is important to keep your URL sentences to between 50 and 60 characters.

Better Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable text that links one webpage to another. By default, anchor texts are blue but can be any color depending on your website’s settings. When used on your site, anchor texts should be very concise and to the point. They also need to be relevant to the page that they are linking to. While it is ok to have a keyword on the anchor text, one needs to be very careful to ensure that keywords are not crammed on to the anchor text.