Many people believe that SEO is hard but this is not true. Basic SEO configurations are very easy to implement and sometimes this is all you need to do to for maximum exposure on all major search engines.
If you are looking for a quick guide with simple but yet effective SEO tips then you are on the right page, read on!
Simple Tips to Improve your SEO
- Optimize your titles, URL and descriptions
- Provide useful and fresh content
- Improve your website’s loading time
- Make sure that your website is mobile friendly
- Register your website with Google and Bing webmaster tools
1. Optimize your titles, URL and descriptions
This is probably the oldest tip in the SEO industry but it is still the most important. Have a look at the examples below and ask yourself these questions:
- Which one is more descriptive?
- Which one is catchy and friendlier to the user?
- Which one gives you a very good idea of what the website is about without clicking?
- If you saw both in the search results, which one would you choose?
I am sure that the ‘first example’ is your answer to the above questions and this is expected because it presents:
- A unique and meaningful title
- A catchy description
- A well formatted URL
Examine your website using this way of thinking and if there is room for improvement in your titles and descriptions, this is your first priority and a great first step for getting better rankings.
The page titles and descriptions are shown in the search results, so take this opportunity and ‘advertise’ your website to potential users, in the best way possible.
These three guides will help you go through this process:
- How to optimize your page titles
- How to optimize your meta descriptions
- How to create SEO Friendly URLS
2. Provide useful and fresh content
One of the reasons you have a website or blog is to provide content to build an audience, keep your existing readers happy or gain new customers.
By content we mean anything from articles, videos, infographics, slideshows, music, comments, reviews or anything else that is suited for your niche.
If your content is static, old or out of date then most probably your visitors will go away quickly and never come back.
What is your first reaction when you visit a website that has out-of-date content? It’s exactly the same as the users visiting your website.
A couple of years ago we used to say to our clients that updating was not a very important SEO factor but this has changed due to the competition.
There is big competition in every keyword you search and those websites that have the most useful and fresh content, have more chances of winning the race.
Does this mean that you have to post new content daily? Not necessarily. Your publishing strategy depends on a number of other factors as well.
3. Improve your website’s loading time
If this is the first time you are reading that page speed is important for SEO then soon after reading this post you should do whatever is needed to improve the loading time of your website.
If you have read about this before and have not yet done anything about it, you are doing a big mistake.
Because this is important I will keep it simple:
Page speed is an SEO ranking factor – if you have two similar websites and the one is faster than the other, you can expect that it will also rank higher (provided that other things are equal).
Faster websites generate more conversions – This means more sales, more RSS subscribers and more clicks on your ads (if you are using Adsense for example).
More page views – When a website loads fast users are likely to visit more than one page before they leave.
How can you improve the speed of your website? I know that it is not an easy task especially if you are not a technical person but it is important to handle page speed without further delays.
When working on clients websites page speed is among the first things we handle and the results in terms of conversions are sometimes immediate.
If you cannot afford to hire an SEO expert or a developer to make your web site load faster, what you can do is the following:
- Remove big images
- Remove unnecessary JavaScript files
- Use sprites instead of small images to minimize http redirects
- Move to a faster hosting provider
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service
- Use these resources from Google for more tips and tools
4. Make sure that your website is mobile friendly
There are many reasons as to why your website should be mobile friendly.
First and foremost is the fact that most of your users are coming from mobile. If you go and check your Google Analytics reports and especially the “Mobile Overview” report (found under AUDIENCES / MOBILE), you will notice that more than 70% of your traffic comes from mobile.
This means that if your website is not optimized for mobile viewing, these people will leave your website and probably never come back again.
Second, Google has introduced a ‘mobile-first index’, that is used for indexing mobile websites. Gradually this mobile index will serve all mobile users.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, it will not be part of the Google mobile index and this means a huge drop in traffic.
What you should do? Three simple steps:
#1 – Test your website with the Google Mobile Friendly Test and try to implement their recommendations for making your website mobile friendly.
#2 – Make sure that the content you show to mobile users is the same (or very close), to the content you have on your desktop website.
This includes both content, images and links. If you already have a responsive website then this should not be an issue.
#3 – Test your website with Google mobile speed test. I’ve mentioned above that speed is important for SEO but for mobile websites it’s also critical.
Measure how long it takes to load your pages on normal mobile connections (3G) and take all necessary actions to improve the speed as much as possible.
5. Register your website with Google and Bing webmaster tools
Not having your website registered with webmaster tools is like driving with your eyes closed.
This is true and I cannot think of any valid reason as to why you should not take advantage of the plethora of information given to you by both Google and Bing.
Some people believe that by not registering your website with Google you can ‘hide’ things from them and slip under their radar and reach the top of the search results.
This is not a ‘hide and seek’ game, good long term rankings can only be achieved if you follow valid methods and techniques.
For the record: Google already knows everything they need to know about your website with or without submitting it to webmaster tools.
Once you go through the registration process and perform some basic configurations you will get notified if there is a problem with your website and also start looking at some interesting facts about your website like:
- Number of index pages
- Number of incoming links
- Search queries
- Crawl errors
- Number of internal links
If you are new to webmaster tools you can start with these 3 tutorials:
- How to add your website with Google Search Console
- How to find and fix indexing errors with Google Search Console
- How to use Bing webmaster tools for beginners
Conclusion
The above 5 tips are simple but at the same time they are also very important.
If you are running a blog, ecommerce store or content driven website and you are not getting traffic from search engines, then you need to ensure that you have implemented the above 5 tips correctly.
5 simple tips but it really speaks big. Thanks for sharing these 5 simple beautiful tips for SEO.
thanks mate, i really hope to see some improvements at my end 🙂
Thank you Alex, it is much helpful to me to improve my website traffic.
This is very informative tips. these tips help to improve my website ranking. so thank you for sharing this post.
great tips, thanks!
Awesome post! Already bookmarked. I’m blogging about healthy food. I’ve been trying put traffic to my newly blog for months into no avail. The only thing that get me from stale mate point is that I’ve performed some serious keyword expansion. I’ve got help from support guys from the SEO tool I’ve been using. Now I know how to rank well for as many relevant keywords as possible and it did miracles to by blog. The tool calls SERPstat and the guy were awesome. Thanks for this post. And huge thanks for the guys who helped me. I’m starting to believe that if you put efforts into something, the universe will oblige)
Right on article – the simple stuff is often so powerful. I have always thought that “content is king” meaning having good fresh content on your site will draw links and traffic to your site. Also testing for functional issues such as speed is an important part of the quality algorithmn from Google. thanks.
Thank you so much for the great tips on improving my SEO. I have a travel content business but now turning my attention to improving websites using various tips like what you have outlined in this post. Thanks again!
Hi Derek
You can also read this: https://www.reliablesoft.net/the-ultimate-guide-on-how-to-seo-your-travel-website/ which is specifically for travel websites.
Thanks
Alex
I never realised google authorship is that important as you say. I must follow this from now. Thanks for sharing 🙂
Hi Santosh
Actually is no longer important. I will update the article to reflect that.
Thanks
Alex
very useful tips
This really helps narrow things down. I’ve ready many blogs about SEO and they give a long list in what to look for in a website. You have simplified the factors on what Google looks and this can make it really clear to anyone new to SEO.
Thanks Alex for this is very informative tips. I hope these tips help to improve my website ranking. so thank you for sharing this post.
Thanks Alex.
You’ll be surprised how many websites don’t optimize their title tags, such a gimme.
Also, people need to understand updating the title tag without creating relevant content does nothing.
Really appreciate the easy to follow approach you laid out…straight to the point and valuable
Thank you!
So I just read your article, and I agree with it for the most part. On-page SEO is important. BUT, not as important as off-page SEO. As long as your domain and title have your keywords in them. Along with having variations of the keywords throughout the content scattered maybe 3-4 times (depending on how much content you have), your on-page is pretty much alright. The main factor in ranking sites is backlink relevancy. Be sure to tell the readers that if it’s a local site, get your citations, and maybe go through blogs and leave some nice comments (such as I’m trying to do now 🙂 ) But relevant backlinks are king for 2017!
Thanks for the read
Hi, ALEX CHRIS
You have presented all things in a very easy way. Optimization of titles, URL, and descriptions is very important but many SEO professionals do not follow keyword proximity and keyword prominence in the title tag, meta tag, URL and main content. Whats your opinion about Keyword Proximity and Keyword Prominence?
Thanks for your great efforts!
Thank you Alex, it is much helpful to me to improve my website traffic
I am really impress with your blog so 3 words for your website, unique information, good selection of topic and quality.
Thank you for the amazing seo tips for better ranking. All 5 points are very useful and important for seo ranking factors.
Thanks for this helpful points about SEO. Really amazing content.
Great tips here, SEO is so important for all websites, i make sure i have CDN’s so my website load speed is very fast!
Thanks for this, a really awesome article. You covered the simplest of things, but people often forget that basics are the most important. I really agree with the importance of updating contents frequently, not only from SEO persepective, but contents are one of, if not the best way to gain more traffic (and hopefully conversion). Again, awesome! Thanks.
In 2018, loading time is the most important part of the website ranking in search engine. Website that has less loading time can easily be ranked higher in mobile searches.
These are very basic, but very important points that should be considered while starting with SEO on our website. Perfect use of very niche relevant high-quality content based on targeted keywords helps us to rank in search engine. Very nice post for the people who are looking for basic ideas/areas they should look into for SEO optimization of the website.
Whenever you are designing a website, If it is a e-commerce website or any website that is product specific or business oriented then you will have to make the as much as possible advertise so you can sell your products easily.
It’s great that you elaborated on ways you can increase your SEO; it can be pretty overwhelming. Personally, I believe that one of the best things you can do is to make your site mobile friendly. From what I understand most traffic comes through mobile nowadays, so it would be smart to cater to that.
Greetings, Alex!
The points that you have mentioned are extremely important from an SEO perspective. Along with the perfectly optimized metadata, a quick loading & mobile friendly website and fresh content, An SSL certificate is also recommended for better rankings.
Thanks for mentioning “mobile-friendly website”. With Google’s mobile-first index, it is a must to have a mobile-friendly website.
Hey Alex, Brilliantly Covered Important and Crucial SEO tips. I wanted to add my view on it, “I feel that SSL and HTTPS are also very Important SEO Factor”. I mean if you see every single website on Google’s First Page is SSL and Https Enabled.
Hey,
Thanks for sharing the tips on Better ranking for the website. These tips seems to be good but also I can suggest few tips on better Ranking Fixing broken inks, Social Media Sharing, Improving readability of content on your website.
Thanks again for your valuable tips and hope you share more
I liked that you explained that it is important to make sure that you are descriptive in your website’s titles and URL. That wouldn’t have been something I would have thought about doing. It seems like it would be smart to get a professional to help you do SEO work.
This article is a treat for all of us who wants to improve traffic for our blogs and websites. Easy to understand and pretty much helpful in every way.
If I could add anything it would be to choose your keywords wisely. This is so important.
Many people make the mistake of setting up their campaign with a monster keyword. I’m not saying it’s not possible to rank for a big keyword, but it’s extremely difficult nowadays. It’s much better to find the golden nugget keywords, that have high volume, low competition. (They do exist)
Hi Farhan
I agree, choosing your keywords wisely is important.
Thanks
Alex
Great Article, so much information article and these tips are very useful for SEO Optimizer. love to read it, thanks for sharing!!!
Hi James
Thanks a lot for your comment. Glad I could with easy tips.
Thanks
Alex
These five basic tips are essential for an SEO friendly website. I would advice everyone to take note of the number one point, it speaks volume for a successful CTR. I am hopeful more tips on backlinks and keywords will also be of great help to newbies.
Hi Anthony
Thanks for your comment. Good advice. Yes, optimizing your page title is perhaps the most important SEO tip.
All the best
Alex
Thank you for the amazing seo tips for better ranking. All 5 points are very useful and important for seo ranking factors
Wonderful SEO techniques for higher ranking on google. Thanks for sharing this information I loved your content
Wow Amazing seo tips for better ranking of our website. Your article is easy to understand with must needed seo tips. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for this amazing post! I have noticed on-page has a huge effect on the ranking of the website. If the title description is optimized your site will start indexing in google.
Great insights… very useful for every SEO practitioners. The most important points you pointed out for ranking a website faster and for better user experience as well. Thanks for sharing these great insights.
A basic rules for doing SEO.
Informative!
Useful!
Bountiful of knowledge!
Keep sharing.. (ThumbsUP)
Thank you Alex
Your article is very informative and i guess it will help me boost my website rank on search engine
Keep writing.
I believe that learning SEO gives the affiliate and those who work with digital marketing, a tool that will put you in front of many other people who have not yet studied it. 😉