How to improve your SEO in three steps

WP Newsify team decided to share with you their experience in using SEO techniques to make your website easily found by search engine machines. Read this article and note these steps to try with your project.

A high SEO rating can be a make or break factor in building up a successful site. Featuring prominently on top of search engine results means that a lot of “random” visitors will come by your site. While building your foundation on a group of regular, loyal visitors is something to strive for, especially in the long term, you’ll also need to build up your traffic by attracting visitors who are looking for specific content, rather than a specific site.

Looking over lists of how to improve your SEO rating you’ll see the same thing being repeated over and over again – use recognizable and unique keywords, improve your speed, optimize your site for mobile use etc. Since there are already enough of these, common, ways making the rounds, we’ve decided to dig a little deeper and give you some things you can do that probably don’t come to mind that often, but can be just as effective.

1. Redirecting properly

When using search engines, you get links back as results of your searches, but what happens when the links in question are dead links. All sites tend to grow and evolve over time and it’s not uncommon that pages get lost in the shuffle leading to URLs that aren’t working but are still being listed as results in searches. This leads to the dreaded 404 error pages. Accumulate enough of these as results and your rating will plummet. The best way to avoid situations like these is to implement a system that redirects old, unused page URLs to functioning ones. You could do this manually, however that would take up enormous amounts of your time and there is a real chance you’d miss something. That’s why it’s a good idea to find a plugin that will do all the work for you.

One we’ve found is perfect for the job is WP 301 Redirects. It’s really easy to set up and it will both take care of your previous pages and new ones automatically redirecting any dead links to ones that are in use. Redirecting correctly will mean every time one of your pages is accessed through a link in a search engine it’s actually going to open and, additionally, it will make navigating your pages an enjoyable experience keeping your visitors present longer, both of which will contribute to keeping your SEO rating high.

2. Properly format your pages

Believe it or not, when chasing that first-page result, it’s not only the content that’s taken into account but also the way everything is laid out and how the elements are used. We aren’t talking about keywords here, but instead, how the actual content is presented. There are plenty of plugins that are able to generate a reading score and even provide you with some tips on how to improve said score. They take into account various factors paragraphs lengths, through internal linking to your other pages, to a quantifiable score of how easy to read an article is (sentence length, use of passive etc.). It’s up to you to figure out how closely will you follow this feedback, but since you’ve installed it, you might as well use it.

First of all, you should look to make your articles long. At least a 1000 words long that is. It’s been shown that longer texts tend to fare better as query results. The work doesn’t stop there, however. You’ll need to learn pretty quickly how to segment your articles into paragraphs that work together as a cohesive whole. Add to that various headings and you’re on your way to a high reading score and therefore a high SEO score. Once again, the work doesn’t stop with the text. Try to include images, graphs and/or use infographics. It’s important to keep the formatting of this additional content steady, i.e. use one image type, one table type, one graph type etc. – set a standard, keep to it and you’ll quickly see the results. All of these elements combined make for an interesting page that will surely be constantly featured on top of result lists.

3. Answering questions with added links

For those of us a little older, we remember platforms like Yahoo questions, where you can post questions about anything and, chances are, you’re bound to get an answer. Sites like these have exponentially evolved from their counterparts from a decade ago. The way these specific answers are displayed as search engine results, however, haven’t. Queries that start with questions (how to, what is, where can I, do you know etc.) will feature numerous links to answers those or similar questions. Actually, YouTube links and answer sites are almost exclusively present on the first page.

Now you may not think about things like this when trying to improve your SEO rating, but you can only raise your site awareness, speed and keyword count to a certain level. Once that level is reached you need to look into alternate ways to raise your rating and things like this are precisely the ones that can give you that extra push.

Essentially you’ll want to scour the web for questions that relate to the content you publish. Once there, give your answers and insert a link to your page(s). If your answers are good, they’ll get upvoted, making your answers and therefore your links visible to an even larger number of people. Apart from using Reddit upvote bots, users apply the same strategy to achieve better growth. In short, look to promote your pages on sites that are regularly featured and above all – be relevant. Don’t post just to post, try to give quality answers and you’ll be rewarded for your effort in no time.

Conclusion

All the tips we’ve covered won’t be your go-to solutions for increasing your SEO rating. If your site is slow, outdated, doesn’t scale to different screens and is optimized in general your rating will be low no matter how well your links work. There certainly are options you need to look into before moving forward to more niche solutions, but as we’ve mentioned, those that come first to mind can get you to a certain point after which you need to get creative.

By no means are these the only things you can to in order to improve your rating. However, we found that these are the ones that give you the most back, if you invest your time in them and are, at the same time, ones that people tend to gloss over. Be sure to try all, or at least some of these out and we’re sure you won’t be disappointed.